tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70377610219132733752018-03-19T19:57:40.298-07:00GrokInFullnessJubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.comBlogger283125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-5869315160826311072018-03-19T11:01:00.001-07:002018-03-19T11:01:44.756-07:00Rules and Meta-RulesReally interesting Econlib post <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2018/McKenziebrain.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Basically, one economist says (paraphrasing, not actually quoting here), "I must be irrational, because I could switch to diet soda, which is cheaper and likely just as good. But I don't bother, because I'm stuck in some bad default mode. Even if <i>it's not</i> just as good, it's probably at least worth trying."<br /><br />Another economist says, Hold on there! The brain power necessary for decision-making is a truly scarce resource. You aren't being irrational by creating some simple rules that economize on this resource, such as "always buy Diet Coke." (He says a lot more, but this is my blog so I'm summarizing my own take-away.)<br /><br />This is an important and deep point. You can't simply re-analyze every single decision from scratch. You need some simple rules, such as "Leave work at 4:50", "Set alarm clock for 6:30", and "If we're low on our household stock of Diet Coke, pick up more at the store." You also need a set of meta-rules for resetting these rules of thumb. "If the boss complains about my punctuality twice, set alarm clock for 6:20 instead of 6:30." Or "If the expected benefit of changing from Coke to generic brand exceeds X, switch." The problem here is that you need a rule to <i>even alert you to the possibility </i>of changing a decision-rule. Maybe the benefit of switching from Coke to generic is enormous, so big that almost anyone would agree that it's irrational not to attempt the switch. But you don't just get to know that. You have to sit down for a moment, jot down some figures, grind out a simple calculation, and see the answer. Someone who did this all the time for every little decision would be almost paralyzed by their constant cost-benefit checking. (Flip over a used envelope, or grab a sticky note? Pen or pencil? Or just use Excel? GHAA!) So your meta-rules require not just a set of rules about thresholds that overturn existing rules, but for when you will even bother to check whether the threshold has been crossed.<br /><br />This is a theme I've <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/11/richard-thalers-nobel-prize.html">discussed before</a>. I think the whole economic irrationality/behavioral economics thing is way overblown and overdone. Examples of people allegedly behaving irrationally usually have an explanation that is fully compatible with a "rational actor" model. Just add in, say, limited computing power or limited information and you get back to "imperfect but serviceable decision rules."&nbsp; Of course some clever person can pick these rules apart and find that they are occasionally wrong or even that they tend to be biased wrong. Such rules can still be useful.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-85711800910581332992018-03-19T10:17:00.001-07:002018-03-19T10:17:34.775-07:00How Good are Modern Vital Statistics?From the book <i>Drug War Heresies</i>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">It has been said, for example, that French authorities will only record a death as drug-related if a needle is still sticking in the arm, whereas the Germans will include a driving fatality of a one-time client of a drug treatment clinic.</blockquote>&nbsp;Indeed, if you look at the figures in <a href="http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/data/stats2017/drd">this link</a>&nbsp;(click on "EMCDDA Selection B"), Germany inexplicably has more overdose deaths than France. In 2013, Germany had 1179 while France had 349. Germany had 80.65 million people and France had 66 million in 2013. Not enough to explain the difference. Dividing by populations, we get 1.46 deaths per 100k in Germany and 0.53 deaths per 100k in France. This is for two western European that don't differ in any obvious way (no obvious way that would explain a factor of three difference in drug poisoning deaths, anyway). If the reporting bias mentioned in <i>Heresies</i> is real, though, that would certainly explain a difference in the official statistics.<br /><br />This is a theme I've written <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/05/is-there-spurious-trend-in-cdc-drug.html">about</a> <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/09/when-drug-overdose-isnt.html">numerous</a> <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/08/casting-more-doubt-on-prescription.html">times</a>. Too many commentators take the official statistics at face value. If mere reporting differences leads to enormous differences in national statistics, then it's likely that <i>changes</i> in reporting biases over time can induce a spurious trend in a time series. It's been a while since I looked at the by-state drug overdose data in any detail, but some patterns in those data suggested a similar bias creeping in. There is enormous state-to-state variation in overdose totals and in the trends over time. Are these differences real or spurious?Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-40520097756523766662018-03-13T10:19:00.002-07:002018-03-13T10:19:18.847-07:00People Actively, Deliberately Spurn Opportunities to Earn More IncomeIn my personal and professional life, I see lots of people deliberately foregoing opportunities to earn more money. I wish that the “income inequality” alarmists would take this seriously and admit that this is a widespread phenomenon. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Almost everyone</i></b> could make various decisions that would increase their income. When someone spurns such an opportunity, I take that as an admission that they are comfortable with their level of income and don’t want to earn anymore. I’m thinking of a few examples.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One is from college. Someone (who I barely knew but had a few classes with) told me he’d had an “epiphany” over winter break. He decided to change his math major to a physical education major. I hope he’s doing well, but this decision to change majors severely limited his options.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I know a lot of actuaries who stop after passing a few exams (there are 9 or 10 total, depending on how you count them). I understand. The exams are a pain in the butt, and this is partly by design. It’s a powerful sorting mechanism. If someone passes all the exams, you can be pretty sure they are serious. If someone passes a couple exams and then stops, you know they have some good analytical chops by maybe they lack the combination of ambition, conscientiousness, willpower, and intelligence that makes a really good actuary. The rewards for passing just one more exam are pretty big. Usually when another adult makes a choice like that I try not to second-guess them, but honestly I think some of these people are being short-sighted. Many of them would be more fulfilled in the long run if they just passed another exam or two (or all of them). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One person I know described his educational trajectory to me: “I finished my poly sci degree with the intention of going to law school. But, man, the slopes of Colorado were calling me. I decided to do some skiing instead.” I assume he knew his own long-term self-interest, but there’s no question such a person is deliberately deciding to earn less than he could. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I sometimes suggest career options to people and get not-very-satisfying excuses for not taking the advice. From a single guy with no kids: “I’d love to take more actuarial exams, but I’m just too busy.” He offered “mowing the law” and “preparing meals” and other mundane household chores as examples of things that made him “too busy,” and he even suggested that people like me with a family had more time because other family members could help with that stuff. (?!) This was really an example of someone not prioritizing the thing that would have allowed him to earn more, and choosing a relatively easy-going home life over long, boring hours of study. I can’t blame anyone for taking that route. But it’s funny how people invent implausible excuses for not doing obvious things that would plainly advance their careers. (This person’s notion that having a family means having <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more</i></b> time to do grueling hours of study is exactly backwards, but at that point I was just politely smiling and nodding. He’d already decided on “No” and then back-fit a lame excuse to his answer.) It’s funny. I actually started hiring a guy to mow my lawn because it bought me a couple extra hours of study time each week, and I’d pack my lunch so would have a few extra minutes over my lunch break to study (I didn’t have to walk to a nearby sub shop, which took precious time). For dinner, I’d fix whatever was fastest (throw burgers on the griddle and let them sizzle, or throw chicken nuggets in the oven and let them cook while I studied, pausing briefly to eat when they were done). If you are prepared to hunker down and study, you can make time for it. It might require shaking yourself out of your routine and making some sacrifices and uncomfortable changes, but it’s not hard. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I hear other weird excuses, too. “I don’t want to do any more school.” Really? Even a few online courses to teach you specific skills relevant to a specific profession? Bullshit. Categorically writing off the possibility of continuing your education is a bad move, not to mention completely arbitrary.<br /><br />Here is one I have heard from several under-employed people: “I want a job as long as it’s not [long list of careers for people with quantitative skills and with an extremely low barrier to entry]. Anything else would be fine.” I think you can afford to be this picky after you’ve had some initial career success and want to do something more creative and rewarding. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>But if someone is setting down these rules at the dawn of their working career, they are setting themselves up for failure. I don’t parse this as “I <i><b>physically cannot</b></i> do more schooling” or “I <i><b>physically can’t</b></i>work an unpleasant job.” I parse it as:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>“I <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could</i></b>do something unpleasant that would earn me more money, but I choose not to.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I think even the inequality alarmists understand this point. If you could keep the conversation out of a political context and talk to them about under-performing family members or friends, they would tell you something like what I said above. Everyone has a sibling with unfulfilled potential, or a brilliant friend who is under-employed and content to stay that way. They will tell you, with sighing, face-palming frustration, that their friend or family member is spurning a perfectly good opportunity for no good goddamn reason. Implicitly, they will admit that those folks on the lower end of the distribution <b><i>could choose</i></b> to be on the higher end if they only made a few unpleasant choices.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is where the inequality mongers need fixate less on metrics and more on philosophy. If people are essentially choosing their position on the income distribution, then income inequality is not a great moral problem. We shouldn't pretend that people are assigned an income by the casting of some cosmic dice or some fickle god's roulette wheel. Sheer introspection and experience with actual people suggests otherwise. At least to this observer.<br /><br />[Note to people who know me personally: If any of this looks familiar, I am not talking specifically about you. These "examples" are really composites of several people with details changed or made vague enough to not identify their real-life inspirations. My younger self is more represented in the above examples than any other single person I know.]</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-56529680531874071622018-03-12T10:14:00.004-07:002018-03-12T10:14:53.942-07:00Make Immigration Restrictionists Pay For Their Own BordersWhen I hear immigration-restrictionists describe the problems immigrants bring with them, I want to reply with "That's great. Build your own damn borders. Stop conscripting me to pay for a 'border' that I don't want."<br /><br />In a&nbsp;<a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/02/there-are-adequate-borders-inside-our.html">previous post</a>, I make the point that someone can't just "come here" even under an open borders regime. They can't just walk across the border and merely exist. They have to somehow link themselves into the existing society. They have to acquire housing. They have to either acquire a job or plead for mercy from someone who will bankroll their stay here. They have to obey the norms and formal rules of any establishment they enter. Or else they will get kicked out. All of this entails convincing someone&nbsp;<i>who is already here</i>&nbsp;that you're worth dealing with as a human being. "Yes, I will rent to you" or "Yes, I will give you a job" or "Yes, I will marry you." I called that post "There Are Adequate Borders Inside Our Borders." Someone who considers coming here not really intending to follow the rules will foresee that the entire venture will not be worthwhile and forego the trip altogether. People know that there are internal borders, and they'll have to cooperate with their neighbors, co-workers, etc. in order to navigate those borders.<br /><br />I'd actually like to see existing policy flipped. Currently it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of national origin for someone who lives here legally, but getting legal permission to come here is a bit of a legal/bureaucratic nightmare. I'd like to see almost no discrimination <i>at the national border,</i>&nbsp;aside from perhaps some minimal vetting to keep out known criminals. But I'd like to give property owners and private organizations more freedom to decide who they will or won't take as members or customers. If some bigot wants to put up a "no immigrants" sign on his store front, let him. I think the concern, that this kind of discrimination would be widespread, is vastly overblown. A bigoted store owner knows that an immigrant's money is as green as anyone else's, so he's likely to keep his petty prejudices to himself, perhaps even rethink them. Even if there are store owners who are truly committed bigots, their shops will end up being owned by people who aren't so arbitrarily discriminating. Productive resources tend to end up owned by those individuals who will coax the greatest productivity out of them. Someone without hangups about immigrants will buy the store from the bigoted owner and turn a higher profit, or simply open a store across the street and drive the bigot out of business.<br /><br />At any rate, a "no national borders, but you're free to discriminate" regime forces immigration restrictionists to pay the cost of building their own borders. The foregone revenue of potential customers, the added security and enforcement mechanisms, the social stigma and potential boycotts for treading on our society's sacred anti-discrimination norms. I think it's cowardly to unload these costs on other people. I want to say, Do your own dirty work, buddy. You get to enter a private booth every two years and secretly mark a little box for the "anti-immigrant" policy. I'd love to see that veil of secrecy taken away. Private policy suffices here; there is no need to make "keep immigrants out of my life" a matter of public policy. Despite the name, private "anti-immigration policy" would actually be more visible and subject to greater scrutiny. And the discriminators would have to pay the costs themselves. I think that would be true justice.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-63625589399413830132018-03-11T17:31:00.002-07:002018-03-11T17:31:28.583-07:00Jordan PetersonI’m currently reading Jordan Peterson’s book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">12 Rules for Life</i>. Because why not? I probably would not have heard of Peterson if not for his loud and obnoxious detractors making overblown, hysterical criticisms and comparing him to a Nazi. (I sometimes wonder if these agitators understand just how counterproductive their methods are.)<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This naturally piqued my curiosity, so I watched a few Youtube videos. He is actually quite mild mannered and reasonable. His overall message is not obviously contrary to the social justice movement, and it would be a stretch to classify him as "conservative" or "right-wing." The outrage directed at him is kind of confusing, but I can think of an explanation.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Part of his message (in my reading anyway) is that you can improve your own life through deliberate, conscious effort. This is threatening if your narrative is that people are assigned their station in life. If you believe that life outcomes are the result of power structures, classism, sexism and racism, then telling people that they can take command of their own destiny is threatening. It places too much moral responsibility back on the individual, rather than placing it on this amorphous blob known as “society” (or “the patriarchy” or “imperialism”). Well, he’s a clinical psychologist. What’s he supposed to tell his clients? “Sorry, there’s nothing you can do about anything, because all social problems are structural and beyond your control.” He started posting his lectures to Youtube because he thought that maybe people other than his direct clients might find some of his advice useful. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The social justice movement has become something of a religious movement in the following sense: People demonstrate their righteousness by making obscenely implausible claims. Anyone who signs on by affirming such claims is seen as having serious conviction. Anyone who pushes back is seen as insufficiently committed, perhaps even a turncoat. If someone makes a ridiculous claim like “All gender differences are socially constructed” or “All inequality is the result of structural oppression,” agreeing with such an absurdity signals your loyalty to the cause. If you object with some obvious criticism, you get a “How dare you go against the cause?!” kind of reaction. The more articulate and thoughtful your objection, the more of a threat you are and the worse you will get denounced for it. I think Peterson triggered this reaction by saying he wouldn’t allow his speech to be controlled by the force of law. (Specifically, he objected to the demand that he use someone else’s prescribed gender pronouns rather than the ones he and other English speakers are used to. More specifically, he objected to being compelled by the force of law to do so. That's a perfectly reasonable objection, unless you're trapped inside a virtue-signalling "How dare you betray the cause?" paradigm.)<br /><br /></div>All that aside. Peterson's book is useful in the same sense that all other self-help literature is useful. It's a big mix of "That's obvious to any mature adult" and "That's obvious enough, but plenty of people need to hear it" and "That's obvious after the fact, but <i>I</i> needed to hear it just now." Even if the third thing is only 5% of the book, it can still be worth it. There is a chapter on disciplining children that I very much appreciated, even though I was already following most of his advice (I think). His description of putting his defiant 9-month-old son down for a&nbsp; nap was adorable and hilarious. He also describes teaching the same defiant son to accept a spoon-feeding. It's hard to describe how happy this made me feel. It was a heartwarming dose of humanity.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-27754503528921199942018-03-11T14:59:00.002-07:002018-03-11T14:59:41.204-07:00Bad Economics and Net Neutrality<br /><div class="MsoNormal">I see bad economic arguments all the time in news commentary and in casual conversation. It feels to me like people are “under-theorizing” the problem. It’s not that everyone should have a rigorous mathematical model behind every piece of commentary, but a little bit of disciplined thinking could go a long way.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In discussions of net neutrality, I get the impression that people have a very crude model such as: “Internet Service Providers are monopolies, so they get to call the shots. They can throttle competitors and direct you to their partners or to their own services.” This model gets it wrong because <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-economics-of-monopoly-and-net.html">it’s too crude</a>. Even monopolists face a downward-sloping demand curve. They lose revenue if they set the price too high, or if they intentionally sabotage their own product in the way that neutrality advocates claim they do. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This isn’t the only example of under-theorizing. “Employers have monopsony power, so they call the shots.” is another example. Or “Employers have market power, so they can force employees to tolerate working conditions worse than what they’d actually like.” These stories are too simple. Even an employer with monopsony power (a rarity in the real world) loses out if they set the wage too low. Even an employer with some kind of market power would rather give their employees relatively cheap perks and fringe benefits rather than more money. If the employer (no matter how powerful) can provide safety features for $1 that the employee values at $3, the employer will do so. There’s no opportunity to exploit here, no matter how much power the employer has and no matter how greedy he is. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The elixir for bad economic reasoning isn’t a thorough formal model. A tiny amount of formal reasoning usually suffices. “Monetize the value of ‘directing internet users to my products’ and compare it to the monetized value of ‘making the internet more valuable by opening it up to my direct competitors’.” Or how about “Monetize the value of air conditioning and safety features that my employees value, and compare it to the extra wages I’d have to pay to make them go without.”</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-21824040209132048902018-03-09T11:01:00.001-08:002018-03-09T11:01:16.531-08:00Why Grandparents are More Lenient Than Parents: Possible Explanations<br /><div class="MsoNormal">There is often tension between parents and grandparents regarding how strictly small children should be disciplined. Grandparents are much more permissive of misbehavior and do not enforce the boundaries set by the parents. This often leads to resentment by the parents. The child is learning bad habits because the grandparent tolerates them, and the parent will be tasked with correcting the behavior later. Even excepting this, the child learns that the rules are different when the grandparents are around. (Perhaps it’s always worth pleading to other adults for a better deal when mom and dad are being big meanies?) The grandparents sometimes actively sow confusion and discord by protesting. (“Oh, it’s okay.” Or “Oh, just let him have it.”) This poisons the parents’ moral authority when they have to eventually lay down the law and enforce a rule. Finally, “Where the hell was all this permissiveness when I was a misbehaving little brat!?” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Possible explanations present themselves.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"></div><ol><li><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Different incentives. If the grandparent spoils the child, either by giving them too many presents or permitting too much misbehavior, they get all the benefits of spoiling the child with almost none of the costs. The parents will have to deal with the problem the next time the child, say, begs for a toy in the store or jumps on the couch. The grandparent gets a temporarily happy kid, while the parents have to deal with the petulant little monster this creates.</span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Mellowing out. Young parents are often stressed and not fully mature. A 60-year-old has more social intelligence than a 20-something or even a 30-something. So maybe younger parents really are too harsh and short-tempered and keep their children on too short a leash? Maybe if the parents mellowed out a little, they’d act more like their grandparents. And maybe if the grandparents could impart their full wisdom on their 20-something selves, they would have been more permissive, too.</span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Changing generational norms. Maybe the younger generation simply has stricter parenting norms than the previous generation? This is distinct from 2) because it is about how society as a whole changes over time, as opposed to how individuals change as they age. I find this one hard to believe, given that corporal punishment has been declining for decades (see Steven Pinker’s </span><i style="text-indent: -0.25in;">The Better Angels of Our Nature</i><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> for a long treatment). I doubt if many grandparents suddenly pull out the paddle when the kid misbehaves.</span></li></ol><!--[if !supportLists]--><o:p></o:p><br /> <div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Others?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course these explanations are not mutually exclusive. It could be some combination of all three. I put most of the weight on 1) because I have seen some particularly dunderheaded grandparental meddling, and done by grandparents who would certainly not have tolerated the child’s bad behavior from their own children. Also, I have seen where a grandparent suddenly become stricter when they have to deal with the child for an extended period of time. For example, when they take the child for a weekend. In this case, the cost of spoiling the child is "internalized"; the grandparent feels those costs, so they learn not to spoil quite so much. It was amazing to witness this lesson being learned. Something like, "Oh, now I see what you're dealing with!"</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Still, there’s something to be said for 2). My gut says 3) should go in the other direction (making grandparents <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stricter</i></b> than the parents). That said, I can imagine ways that the younger generation of parents are more constraining without being quite as authoritarian. We millennials are a generation of so-called “helicopter parents.” Maybe our parents and grandparents gave us more freedom to roam, but came down harder when news came back to them that we’d misbehaved. They had a “low surveillance, low probability-high severity” regime, compared to the opposite today. (<a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/what-was-gary-beckers-biggest-mistake.html">Gary Becker</a> would have approved.)</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-69672923978311602292018-03-07T11:09:00.001-08:002018-03-07T11:09:14.758-08:00A Bad Argument Against Drug Legalization That I Keep Seeing<br /><div class="MsoNormal">I keep encountering a very bad argument against drug legalization. I have <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/11/against-drug-prohibition.html">pointed out before</a> that there is no need to have legal penalties for the use or sale of drugs because you can accomplish any degree of deterrence less harmfully with a <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/02/drug-prohibition-or-drug-taxation.html">punitive tax</a> or a <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/03/licensing-drug-users.html">requirement of licensure</a> for drug users. L<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The pushback I hear goes something like: I don’t think the tax would be a strong enough deterrent.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is nonsense, of course. The tax can be set arbitrarily high. Does doubling the price not work? Fine, then triple it. Or quadruple it. Or increase it tenfold. This scale goes all the way up to eleven.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Or you can make the “recreational drug use licensure” more onerous. Make the form slightly more obnoxious to fill out, turn it from a half-day session to a full-day session, or a week-long session. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this, I feel kind of like Scott Sumner. If I understand him correctly, he keeps making the point that the Fed can print a lot more money if it wants to, but for whatever reason lacks the political will to do so. They have a continuously adjustable lever, but for some reason they forbear to adjust it beyond some threshold. Just so with drug taxes and licensure. If the penalty is too small, increase it. (I don’t think anyone can plausibly argue that we lack the political will to increase vice taxes. The popular answer to “How much should we tax cigarettes?” is always “More!”, rather than settling on some "correct" tax rate.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I'll concede that the objection isn’t <i><b>totally</b></i> insane. If the penalty is set too high, you end up pushing people back to the black market. <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/04/california-is-taxing-the-hell-out-of-pot">Some states</a> are seeing this with marijuana. They have set their taxes a little too high, and the black market thus maintains a significant market share. Presumably a licensure requirement would similarly push people to the black market.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I think this isn’t so worrying. For one thing, the black market is much cleaner in this scenario, because the supply is diverted from a legal market with modern production standards and regulation (granting for that sake of argument that the latter are helpful). Also, we can always still penalize those people going to the black market for their supply. If necessary, “traditional” law-enforcement style drug prohibition is still around, with the harassment of motorists and jailing/ticketing of users. It’s just very much circumscribed. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve seen this objection pop up in a few places, and it always strikes me as silly. It’s like saying, “We can’t build a fence to keep out intruders, because the fence wouldn’t be high enough.” So build a higher fence, silly.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">None of this is to say I actually support punitively high taxes on recreational drugs. It’s just that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if</i></b> your goal is deterrence, there are far more compassionate and less socially destructive ways to achieve it. The only reason to opt for full-blown prohibition is that you actually enjoy violence or get some kind of&nbsp;<a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/03/ot90-telescopen-thread/#comment-575687">sick thrill out of hurting people</a>.</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-71702749407699752312018-03-03T06:49:00.003-08:002018-03-03T06:49:27.302-08:00The Data Science ConferenceAre any of my readers going to <a href="https://www.thedatascienceconference.com/">this</a>? Chicago, May 3-4. I'll get there late on the 2nd and stay until the 4th. I thought that the Venn diagram of "readers of this blog" and "people doing/interested in data science" might have significant overlap. If anyone wants to meet up, let me know and we can coordinate somehow.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-91555293454275051812018-02-24T22:03:00.001-08:002018-02-25T06:45:23.602-08:00Response to VerBruggen: Law and Liberty Forum On OpioidsRobert VerBruggen wrote the <a href="http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/what-the-opioid-crisis-can-teach-us-about-the-war-on-drugs/">lead essay</a> in the Law and Liberty forum on the opioid “crisis.”<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I won’t summarize it, but you can read the essay to get some context. To me it’s just the standard narrative of the opioid epidemic: we loosened prescribing practices on opioids, which in turn created new addicts, which in turn led to lots of drug overdoses. I posted a debunking of this story <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/debunking-standard-narrative-on-opioid.html">here</a>.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">In that piece I tried to refute the narrative that VerBruggen is selling to his readers. I could just post a link to that piece and say, “Moving on.” But it might be more constructive to respond specifically to his piece.<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The very first sentence of the essay gets us off to a bad start:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq">America has seen a veritable explosion of serious drug abuse over the past two decades.</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">Not it has not. Opioid abuse <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/prescription-opioid-abuse-is-declining.html">has been flat</a> since at least 2002, even declining in recent years. Heroin use has increased in very recent years (we’ll get back to that later), but as I have pointed out repeatedly these are two different trends and should be treated very differently. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>It makes little sense to combine heroin/fentanyl overdoses (a big risk applied to a small population) and prescription opioid overdoses (a small risk applied to a very large population) and call it “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> opioid epidemic.”&nbsp;<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe VerBruggen would take issue with the government statistics on prescription opioid abuse and addiction. Maybe there’s some kind of reporting bias that’s masking the trend or something. I’m fine with playing the “let’s doubt official government statistics because they might not be accurate” game. In fact, let’s play that game with the drug overdose statistics. <o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I argue <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/08/casting-more-doubt-on-prescription.html">here</a> and <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/09/when-drug-overdose-isnt.html">here</a>&nbsp;that it’s difficult to actually assign a cause of death to an individual body. I suspect that a lot of medical examiners are writing down “drug overdose” because it’s a handy explanation in some cases where the actual cause might be harder to discover (or inherently ambiguous). But don’t take my word for it. Do pick up a copy of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Karch’s Pathology of Drug Abuse</i> textbook. I provide several excerpts in which he cautions the reader as to just how hard this problem is. In fact, I had to pare down my list of quotes for those posts because it was getting very long.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">I have scoured the drug overdose data in great detail. It’s the same dataset from the CDC that VerBruggen is getting his numbers from. I find a lot of irregularities and a lot of indications of a <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/05/is-there-spurious-trend-in-cdc-drug.html">spurious trend</a>. “A body is a body, so there can’t be a spurious trend in death counts” one might be tempted to say. But the assigned cause of that death is malleable and subject to various guesses, mistakes and reporting biases. I think that is part of the story. Opioid prescriptions did something like triple from 1999 to 2015. If three times as many people are walking around with opioids in their bloodstreams, that’s three times as many opportunities for a cardiac arrhythmia or other mysterious sudden death to get marked down as a drug overdose. Or perhaps the death isn't "mysterious" in the sense of lacking an obvious cause, but rather has many contributing causes competing for the top spot of "underlying cause." Indeed, a typical drug decedent is <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/06/drug-overdoses-vs-chronic-illness-what.html">sick</a> and <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/06/age-is-major-risk-factor-in-drug.html">old</a>, compared to the average user who is much younger and healthier. These CDC death records can list up to 20 contributing causes of death; if any of those are drug-related it is almost always labeled a "drug poisoning." You rarely see it going the other way, where "sleep apnea" is listed as the main/underlying cause with "other opioids" as a mere "contributing cause of death." I’m not literally claiming that the full rise is explained by miscoding deaths, but some large fraction likely is. I point out in <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/05/is-there-spurious-trend-in-cdc-drug.html">this post</a> that there were zero drug overdoses in certain states in 1999 (based on my filtering/counting which I think is defensible; see post for details). That seems implausible to me. It looks a lot more like they just weren’t looking for those things, until more recently when people (specifically medical examiners) caught on that this was happening. (Death codes changed over from the ICD-9 to the ICD-10 codes in 1999, which plausibly kicked off a spurious trend. As in, "Oh, there's a code for that now!")</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">VerBruggen takes the same approach that I criticized in a German Lopez piece: He starts with the total number of drug overdose deaths (“over 50,000”) and then tells his readers that 2/3rds involve some kind of opioids. Why start with an over-count, then force your readers to pull out a calculator (or open an Excel workbook) and multiply by 0.67? I suppose he sort of justifies this by saying, “In the official statistics that year, nearly two-thirds of drug overdoses involved an opioid of some kind—an undercount since many overdoses are not properly coded as opioid-related.” Alright, so miscoding causes of death is a problem? I agree. It’s throwing off official death statistics? I agree. But let’s count errors in both directions, or if we can’t estimate those errors admit to a little more skepticism. <o:p></o:p><br /><br />By the way, the "over 50,000" thing is kind of a pet peeve of mine and it screams "sloppy." You can only get to "over 50,000" if you count suicides. See my workup of the 2015 data <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/12/update-on-drug-poisoning-data-for-2015.html">here</a>. If we only count unintentional overdoses, the number is more like 44,000. About 15% are either suicides (mostly) or "undetermined intent" (a smaller proportion), assuming once again that the medical examiner was correct. Fifteen percent isn't a huge correction, but adding in ~8,000 deaths that have nothing to do with the problem you're writing about is hard to defend. You could tell a story such as "These suicides happened because the decedent was a miserable addict and couldn't take the shame anymore," but this is getting speculative. You don't get to count suicides as part of "the opioid epidemic" just because the physical/chemical cause of death was the same. Anyway, this is all slightly pedantic, because unintentional opioid overdoses are clearly high and rising.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">VerBruggen introduces the book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreamland</i> by Sam Quinones, which is another presentation of the standard narrative (this time in book-length form). I found <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreamland</i> to be frustrating and mostly useless for all the reasons my regular readers will be familiar with.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq">[I]f, by contrast, the abusers of opioids are mainly individuals who abused them from the beginning, then the epidemic is a strong indicator of the consequences of entirely legalizing drugs. It is a demonstration of what happens when drugs are in full supply, safely manufactured, and easily available to those seeking a high and at risk of addiction.</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m sorry, but this is <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/01/do-recent-events-support-drug.html">just wrong</a>. The past 20 or 30 years are not an example of drug legalization. It’s not an example of relaxing prohibition, even on a specific class of drugs. Does anyone think they could just <i>ask</i> their doctor for opioids and get them? Of course not. Doctors are extremely suspicious of people who come to their offices complaining about pain, more so people directly requesting opioids. I hear media accounts of “pill mills” handing out too many pain pills with little oversight, but this is mostly a fringe phenomenon. Considering the number of severe chronic pain patients who can’t get opioids (some of whom <a href="https://medium.com/@ThomasKlineMD/suicides-associated-with-non-consented-opioid-pain-medication-reductions-356b4ef7e02a">commit suicide</a>), considering that Cato was writing about an anti-opioid crack-down as <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/treating-doctors-drug-dealers-deas-war-prescription-painkillers">early as 2005</a>, considering that Jacob Sullum was writing about this paranoia a<a href="http://reason.com/archives/1997/01/01/no-relief-in-sight">s early as 1997</a>, I think I’m on solid ground saying that obtaining opioids was never easy. (Sure, you could pick nits about how these are "libertarian" sources, but 1) the underlying information is still relevant and still stands and 2) who else would you expect to be writing about this kind of government overreach?) VerBruggen's presentation of the recent decades as a slackening of legal restrictions on recreational use of opioids is just wrong. Sure, the sheer tonnage prescribed increased by a factor of 3 or so. That doesn't mean it's easy to get your hands on some.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p><br /><br />(Anecdote: I was in the E.R. in a Columbus, OH hospital in 2006. There was a lady in the waiting room complaining vaguely about pain, presumably trying to get a prescription of opioids. This isn't much of an <i>anecdote</i> really, because everyone in medicine knows this kind of thing happens all the time. Are most of these people successful? If opioids are so freely available, why do they go to so much trouble?)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Much of the recent increase in opioid prescriptions is for acute pain after a surgery or after an accident. Maybe this mildly increases the number of “pills in circulation” (a term I’ve heard used to describe the passage of pills from legitimate patients to the black market). But what’s going on here? These unused pills are very dispersed, sitting a few per bottle in separate medicine cabinets in separate homes. Do a large fraction of these really make it into the hands of addicts? Do the patients themselves sell them? Do addicts have access to enough dispersed medicine cabinets to support a habit? (As in, can they visit the homes of enough friends and relatives, get access to their master bathrooms, and steal enough opioids to support a habit?) I’d like someone to better fill in this part of the story, because it seems pretty implausible to me.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">As to this: “…then the epidemic is a strong indicator of the consequences of entirely legalizing drugs.” No, of course it’s not. There is a long list of <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/09/mostly-harmless-hallucinogens-evidence.html">essentially</a> <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/09/mostly-harmless-dissociative.html">harmless</a> <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/10/why-is-ibogaine-illegal-schedule-one-no.html">drugs</a> that we could legalize. If there is <i>any amount</i> of substitution away from alcohol, tobacco, opioids, and cocaine (the biggest killers), it is worth legalizing those. I’m not sure to what extend “potential opioid users” and “potential psychedelic” or “potential dissociative anesthetic” users overlap, but there would surely be some people who are satisfied with the harmless substances and would thus not bother with more dangerous highs. I don’t understand how this sentence even made it into his essay, because in the very next part he begins to discuss marijuana legalization. This should have been an opportunity to pause and reflect on ways to divert people away from opioids by reducing the cost of other options. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>It is unlikely that total intoxication would rise in a society of full legalization; rather people would choose the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">least costly</i> forms of intoxication (least costly as measured in health and time costs as well as dollar costs).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote class="tr_bq">[T]hose opposed to even the legalization of marijuana at this point have to admit that the public is not on their side. Support for marijuana legalization has crossed the 50 percent threshold...When it comes to legalizing hard drugs, the case is otherwise: Very few Americans are in favor.</blockquote><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Such surveys aren’t much good if people are constantly being misled by sensationalist drug journalism. Read Dan Baum's <i>Smoke and Mirrors</i> for a full account of this history. Every new drug "epidemic" turns into an overblown moral panic, usually before there are any vital statistics or any kind of&nbsp; hard data supporting it. VerBruggen is careful and mild-mannered in his approach. He's hardly a sensationalist himself, and he has looked into the numbers. But his reporting on this story is still misleading.<o:p></o:p></div><br />VerBruggen has two paragraphs on a cultural change in medicine regarding the treatment of pain, which led to the rise in opioid prescriptions. Thank goodness this happened. Some severe chronic pain sufferers have tried every option, and the only thing that works for them is high-dose opioids. VerBruggen to his credit gives a nod to this:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Few would deny that for many patients, pain is real and can devastate their quality of life.</blockquote>What I think he fails to address (perhaps doesn't realize) is that <i>any</i> attempt to restrict opioid use will condemn some of these chronic pain patients to a life of uncontrolled pain. The <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/07/false-positives-false-negatives-and.html">false positive/false negative trade-off</a> is fundamental. It is a sheer statistical fact. There is no way to side-step it. I wish that people in the opioid alarmist camp would state more clearly how comfortable they are with letting chronic pain patients suffer. It doesn't work to just say "Do better screening." We already have the most educated people in society (doctors!) making the decisions regarding who gets what medicine, based on detailed medical histories. Even if we're willing to spend a lot more of society's resources coming up with a better screening mechanism for sorting out addicts, we're already way past the point of diminishing marginal returns. There are two possible ways to reduce "unnecessary" opioid prescriptions: better screening ("our algorithm for predicting who's a pain patient vs. who's an addict is more accurate"), or a stricter cut-off ("for a given level of accuracy, change the threshold by which we label people 'true pain patients' vs 'recreational users faking it'"). The first is unlikely to work at all or to scale up if there even exists a better screening algorithm; the second cuts off more legitimate pain patients. My challenge for opioid alarmists: acknowledge the trade-off, and describe how comfortable you are with cutting off pain patients who are actually suffering. (Some <a href="https://reason.com/archives/2018/02/14/jeff-sessions-cruel-prescription-for-pai">people in high places</a> are disturbingly comfortable with cutting off pain patients and making them "tough it out.")<br /><br />VerBruggen cites <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM198001103020221">a letter</a> published in the <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i>&nbsp;that supposedly kicked off the change in attitudes toward opioids. <i>Dreamland </i>by Sam Quinones also makes repeated references to this letter, asserting or implying that the message in it was wrong. The letter states that only 4 out of 11,882 patients with no prior history of addiction got hooked on opioids after being administered. "We conclude that despite the widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction." <i>Dreamland</i> repeatedly presents this letter as some sort of mistake (VerBruggen's piece simply cites it without necessarily saying it was wrong, though that is the overall tilt of&nbsp; his essay). The sample wasn't representative, it was from a time when opioids weren't readily available on the streets (really?), most of these patients were administered far milder doses than what's given today, etc. But guess what? The conclusion holds up extremely well. Only <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/22/study-of-postsurgical-patients-shows-add">about 1%</a> of opioid-naive post-surgery patients show any sign of misuse after being administered opioids; presumably the rate of addiction is far lower than this.<br /><br />VerBruggen cites a crackdown on pill mills in Florida circa 2010, supposedly leading to a decrease in opioid overdoses. Again, I find this implausible given all the accounts of crack-downs on prominent, legitimate pain doctors going all the way back to the early 2000s. By what objective metrics was there a "crack-down", and when did it start, and what was the level of enforcement before the crack-down? Regression analysis? VerBruggen knows about these. It's an appropriate tool for quantifying the response to policy.<br /><br />He has two paragraphs concerning the rise in heroin overdoses circa 2010 and the tainting with fentanyl, an extremely potent synthetic opioid (~50 times stronger than heroin). He does here point out that it's a very tiny fraction of former opioid users who switch to heroin, and that a heroin habit is much deadlier. Indeed, I've calculated that a heroin habit has an annual mortality rate of about 4% <i>per year</i>&nbsp;(admittedly this is based on probably imprecise or biased information about how many users there are and how many of them die). This again would have been a nice place for VerBruggen to insert some doubt about his proposal to keep drug prohibition in place. There is basically <a href="https://reason.com/blog/2017/08/04/researchers-highlight-the-governments-co">no market demand</a> for fentanyl. Heroin users avoid it if they can, but in a black market it's impossible for them to know what they are getting. Jeff Miron makes this point in his Law and Liberty forum essay, but VerBruggen offers a pretty weak non-response to this point. Like I said in my <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2018/02/law-and-liberty-forum-on-opioids-my.html">response to Caulkins</a>, this is absolutely the fault of drug prohibition. There is simply no way such a dangerous product would be sold, unlabeled and at such a dangerously high dosage, in a legal market. Prohibition advocates are responsible, but they keep trying to take a pass on this.<br /><br />On the age distribution:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Opioid deaths have long been concentrated among the middle-aged but, in the past few years, young adults have been catching up thanks to heroin.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>It's curious that he'd point this out, because it's something <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/09/age-distribution-of-legitimate-and-non.html">I noticed too</a>. By the way, the average opioid death happens at about age 44, while the average heroin death happens at about age 38. By contrast the <i>modal</i> (peak-of-the-distribution) opioid abuser is in their 20s, with a <i>mean</i> age of 33. I think there are important policy implications here. Let's discuss <i>risk factors</i>, rather than just blandly issuing a blanket prohibition with all its nasty side-effects and a full-fledged black market. If most of the deaths are happening when people are older and more infirm, that suggests being cautious with people who have those risk factors. If you have a condition that makes breathing difficult (obesity, apnea), taking a medicine that slows your breathing may be dangerous. A targeted approach is called for, because clearly some populations are at great risk and some populations of users aren't. By the way, check out the chart in my link at the start of this paragraph, in a post I titled "Age Distribution of Legitimate and Non-medical Opioid Use". Notice anything? The age distribution of legitimate users more closely aligns with the distribution of deaths. This could imply that the deaths are coming from legitimate users, who occasionally (meaning&nbsp;<i>very rarely</i>) mix their opioids with other medications or alcohol, or simply take too much. Or it could simply be a product of older, sicker people being more susceptible to drug overdoses, or it could be a symptom of the "misdiagnosing the cause of death" problem I discussed above. Many interpretations are possible, but you may reach different policy implications depending on what you think the true explanation is.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">And now we arrive at the key question: Are we talking here about pain patients—those who have inadvertently become addicted, so much so that they eventually take a fatal dose? Or are these folks non-medical users, who got hooked through deliberate misuse?</blockquote>This is an excellent question, and kudos to VerBruggen for asking it.&nbsp; Again, though, the policy implications are very different depending on how you answer this key question. Suppose it's the former. Well, as stated above it is a very tiny fraction of pain patients who even <i>misuse</i> their prescriptions, let alone become addicted or overdose. Are we willing to let 100 people suffer because <i>one of them</i> might take the drug recreationally? Or if we put it on the basis of avoiding a single incidence of addiction, are we willing to make even more people suffer (say, about 500 if <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/persistence-of-drug-use.html">these proportions</a> are correct) to avoid a single addiction?<br /><br />Or suppose it's the latter: prescriptions don't turn people into addicts, but existing addicts get a hold of loose pills from legitimate prescriptions and "doctor shop". In this case, restricting access to opioids seems even more deranged. "I'm sorry, you can't have the opioids that would spare you a few days or weeks (or months or years) searing pain, because someone who enjoys taking them might get a hold of them." I don't think such a policy would be fair or moral, and, make no mistake, fairness and morality are important considerations. I sometimes see this technocratic, quantitative-without-theory "public health" approach to the opioid issue that seems to want to decrease the body count at all costs. I don't think that's a worthy goal. You need some way of measuring and quantifying these costs, which requires a bit of theorizing.<br /><br />He follows up that passage with a discussion of literature, suggesting that most drug abusers start out having had a legitimate prescription. None of the studies he cites establish causation, though admittedly some may be suggestive. Presumably most of these people started out having tried alcohol or coffee or marijuana, too. With something like ~85 million past-year users of legitimately prescribed opioids (the lifetime number would be much higher) and ~36 million people having abused prescription opioids at some point in their lifetime, these are huge populations.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">To be absolutely clear, 41 percent of addicts’ having started out as medical patients with legitimate prescriptions is hardly a small percentage...</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>To be absolutely clear, <i>at least</i> 41 percent of almost any population will say they've had a legitimate opioid prescription at some point in their lifetime. And just over 10% will say they've abused opioids at some point in their lifetime. We're starting with very high base-rates, folks. So studying past use as a risk factor has some problems. Causation is not established here, only a mildly suggestive correlation, a <i>post hoc</i> kind of argument.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Doctors must prescribe these pills less often without denying relief to people who really do suffer from extreme pain, as they have already started doing.&nbsp;</span></blockquote>Once again, this is simply not possible. The false positives/false negatives trade-off is real. Let's <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-false-positives-false-negatives.html">draw out the curve</a> and restrictionists can tell us what part of the curve they feel comfortable with. But let's stop pretending there is no trade-off to be negotiated. (Amusingly, VerBruggen lectures Miron about trade-offs regarding alcohol legalization in the follow-up essay, which we'll explore later.)<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But since so much of the problem stems from blatantly illegal behavior rather than the misuse of legitimately prescribed drugs...</span></blockquote>I'm actually not so sure. Once again, by several different measures there are no more opioid abusers, despite something like a tripling of prescriptions. An alternative explanation is that, of the 85 million or so legitimate opioid patients, some extremely tiny fraction of them occasionally slips up and mixes medications. Now, clearly many of these overdoses are from addicts or even non-addicted recreational users, but we don't know for sure in what proportions. This is another distinction that has important policy implications. If the rise in opioid deaths is mostly coming from legitimate pain patients, then what we're seeing is a <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/01/is-it-bad-if-prescription-painkiller.html">roughly fixed risk</a>&nbsp;(again, a tiny risk)&nbsp;of overdose simply being applied to a larger population. I don't think that's worrying, and should not spur a moral panic about drug use. It would be like worrying that there are "three times as many back surgery deaths" in an era when back surgery expands three-fold (or suppose driving or trampolines or ATVs or some other activity with a low-but-real risk expands three-fold). Anyway, the "much of" part in that phrase is a hedge, so I'll let it slide as technically true.<br /><br />He launches into an exposition about "how the drug war works."<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The federal system holds very few drug prisoners who weren’t involved in trafficking; </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p15.pdf"><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">in state prisons</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">, only about one-quarter of drug prisoners were sentenced for possession...</span></blockquote>I see a lot of this kind of stuff in drug reform debates, downplaying the number of people in prison. It's still a very&nbsp; large number of people whose lives are ruined for no good reason. Even if it's a <i>small percentage</i> of the total population of prisoners, it's still big. I see a lot of people poo-pooing this as "not the solution to mass incarceration". Fair enough, but it would be a big step.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">&nbsp;<span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In fact, arrests related to possession are </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=datool&amp;surl=/arrests/index.cfm"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">more than quadruple</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> those related to dealing.&nbsp;</span></blockquote>He says this in the context of denying that mere drug <i>users </i>are imprisoned at significant rates, but in fact this shows that these people are indeed harassed by our legal system. More so than incarceration statistics would show. Let's count this harassment in our calculus of whether the war on drugs is worthwhile. It is a cost. Let's add to it all the people who are needlessly harassed without getting arrested, and let's account for the forms of harassment that are <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/cruel-and-unusual-punishment-without.html">far more severe</a> than imprisonment.<br /><br />VerBruggen seems favorable to marijuana legalization, though he raises some unnecessary notes of caution about a harmless substance.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">&nbsp;<span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Marijuana legalization is not consequence-free, to be sure. It drains users of their initiative and, notwithstanding its reputation, it is habit-forming.</span></blockquote>Citation, please? "Habit-forming" is a weasel phrase. It's not chemically addictive in the sense that opioids are, or in the (quite different!) sense that cocaine is. Anything can technically be "habit-forming."<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is not as addictive as opioids and seldom if ever kills those who smoke it.</span></blockquote>Ugh. Just say "never." Sorry for seeming confrontational on something where he and I agree on the policy, but half-hearted endorsements of policies that are obviously good still bother me. If someone is overstating the costs of a policy, I'm going to correct them even if they still reach the same conclusion as I do.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Regarding treatment, we should have no illusions. Many addicts refuse help. We know of no treatment that is effective more than about half the time. And treatment is expensive.&nbsp;</span></blockquote>I mean this next part earnestly: Bravo, Robert! I've said <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/11/drug-courts-and-drug-treatment.html">something similar</a>. Let's not pretend that "more money for treatment" will magically cure all addicts. I think his statement implicitly recognizes free will; an addict who "refuses help" is <i>actively choosing</i> to remain an addict. I think we should all admit that some large fraction of drug addicts are like this, in addition to there being a large population of addicts who desperately want to recover. By the way, VerBruggen should read Maia Szalavitz's book <i><a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/unbroken-brain.html">Unbroken Brain</a></i> for a sort of contrarian take on addiction (I say "contrarian" but it's ultimately more plausible than the "drugs dominate the will" model of addiction).<br /><br />In the same section a couple of paragraphs later, he seems favorable to drug courts. I am skeptical. See the link above to my post on "Drug Courts and Drug Treatment." Drug courts may be a (somewhat more) humane alternative to incarceration, but they are still oppressive and infantilizing to the people who attend them. Assuming we legalize substances that aren't inherently dangerous and limit drug courts to serious addicts who are actually causing problems (a tiny minority of drug users), I'm okay with them.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Addiction medications have proven to be highly effective, if far from 100 percent so. These include methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Or how about let them buy pharmeceutical grade heroin, of a known dosage, unadulterated by super-opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil. Maintenance therapy works. It works by <i>keeping the addict alive</i> for the ten years or so (a typical tenure) that it takes to age out of their habit. Opioids don't do cumulative organ damage like cocaine or alcohol, so the addict can come out of this in good shape once they decide to clean up. Once again, VerBruggen could learn a lot by reading Maia Szalavitz. Anyway, he seems favorable to replacement therapy, so I'll count that as a win.<br /><br />He also seems favorable to needle exchanges and safe injection facilities, and I applaud him for this. But how about we take these things out of the legal grey-zone they are stuck in? Just legalize them and put them in the plain light of day. The main driver of heroin overdoses is once again the fact that the user doesn't know what they are taking. (Also, <a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/03/the_dangers_of.html">recent release from prison</a>&nbsp;is a huge risk factor; this is yet&nbsp;another way in which prohibition exacerbates the drug overdose problem.) Now, it's probably wise to direct heroin users to some kind of supervised facility <i>even in a legal market </i>in case they imprudently take more than they intended to. But this risk would be much lower in a fully legalized market, in which people buy their heroin from a pharmacist rather than a high-school drop out who doesn't even know what he's selling.<br /><br />He ends his essay with the following flourish:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In short, the opioid epidemic has dispelled a lot of myths and quashed a lot of hopes regarding the War on Drugs. Legalizing drugs looks much less wise than it once did and, in any event, has little chance of gaining public support. A much narrower, but still powerful, set of reforms is in order.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Not really. In no meaningful sense has legalization been tried, and thus in no meaningful sense do the past 25 years tell us anything about the likely consequences of drug legalization. Drug users are not getting their heroin from legal, transparent supply chains. Recreational users are not discussing their intentions with pharmacists or doctors, who might caution them about various risk factors. Contra VerBruggen, there is most certainly a safe way to consume drugs, even the ones that are potentially dangerous or addictive.<br /><br />Jeffrey Miron <a href="http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/legalizing-opioids-would-dramatically-reduce-overdoses/">replies</a>, and VerBruggen <a href="http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/the-opioid-epidemic-and-drug-legalization-robert-verbruggen-replies-to-his-critics/">shoots back</a>.<br /><br />He invites us to turn back the clock a decade or two and ask a legalization advocate (his younger self-for example) what would happen if we dramatically expanded opioid prescriptions. He points out, probably correctly, that such an advocate probably would not have predicted the increase in mortality. He accuses Miron of issuing "a post hoc attempt to rationalize away the unexpected result of a disturbing national experiment." Experiment indeed, but once again the past 20 years was not even remotely an experimentation with drug legalization, for all the various reasons described above.<br /><br />I don't quite understand VerBruggen's point with his hypothetical interrogation of a naive drug reformer. "He would have made a bad prediction, so we know his understanding of the world is totally wrong." Is that what he's implying? Let's play that game with VerBruggen. Given your narrative, wouldn't you predict that the number of prescription opioid users and addicts has increased dramatically in recent years? Does your narrative's failure to predict a completely flat trendline mean it's wrong? Not necessarily. But we should certainly bring all evidence to light and do a full appraisal of all competing theories, rather than place the spotlight on any one bad (hypothetical) prediction of one of the several competing narratives. Wouldn't his narrative imply that a crackdown would have <i>reduced</i> opioid-related deaths, when in fact they increased? Is his point about "new addicts versus populations of existing addicts" (stocks versus flows) the same kind of after-the-fact rationalizing that he criticizes?<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Miron further writes that the U.S.’s experiences before 1914 (when opioids were legal) and during Prohibition support his point. Regarding the former, we don’t have good vital-statistics data from a century ago or more, and we also didn’t have as much disposable income to spend on drugs back then, so the comparison is limited. But it’s worth noting that the nation enacted drug restrictions at that time specifically because addiction was becoming a problem, dating back to morphine abuse following the Civil War and opium dens frequented by Chinese railroad workers around the same time.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>VerBruggen accidentally catches&nbsp; himself in a contradiction here. We "don’t have good vital-statistics data from a century ago", and yet "the nation enacted drug restrictions at that time specifically because addiction was becoming a problem." Did we really experience a problematic increase in addiction? How do we know if we didn't have good vital statistics? The impression of a massive society-wide problem is probably based on anecdotes and media accounts of drug-fueled rampages that still dominate, the same kind that sensationalist journalism still produces today. Surely there were real examples of extremely self-destructive, uncontrollable drug addicts. But without good vital statistics, there's no way of knowing how big the actual problem was or <i>whether the government restrictions were justified</i>.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The reality of Prohibition is rather messy, too. It certainly had plenty of bad effects, but <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w9681">recent research</a> suggests it significantly reduced alcohol consumption and liver-cirrhosis deaths. It’s quite possible it saved lives on balance.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>He links to a paper by Miron that estimates cirrhosis death rates possibly declined by 10-20% during prohibition. Presumably this is meant to embarass him, to hoist him by his own petard. A couple of points here. For one thing, Miron and his co-author Angela Dills (if I'm reading the paper correctly) are pushing back against claims of a <i>much more extreme</i> effect of alcohol prohibition on alcohol consumption and related problems. Notice how, nationwide and by-state, cirrhosis levels were trending down and (if I'm reading the graphs correctly) close to their minima already by 1920. Also, VerBruggen should read a lot more of <a href="http://www.tomfeiling.com/archive/AlcoholConsumptionDuringProhibition.pdf">Miron's papers</a>. See (in Figure 1) how various estimates of alcohol consumption do not show such a steep decline, and most show a quick rebound after 1920. Once again, I'm fine with doubting national statistics from this era, but let's either doubt them or believe them consistently.<br /><br />Want to talk about the quality of vital statistics? Let's get into it! In the book <i>Drug War Heresies</i>, the authors discuss the inconsistent (or just consistently awful) quality of drug overdose and abuse statistics across the developed world. It's often hard or impossible to do inter-country comparisons. There is a long discussion of drug policy shifting in Italy, from a lax policy to a crack down with a law enforcement approach and back to a lax policy with a treatment/harm-reduction approach. But all of this was done based on shifting political powers and ideologies; there was virtually no good data supporting these movements. For that matter, are vital statistics any good in the United States in the present day? I have serious reservations, which I discuss at length above. Once again, our survey data seem to indicate that you can triple the amount of opioids prescribed without increasing the number of addicts or the number of non-addicted casual users. If these data are accurate, they significantly refute VerBruggen's whole narrative. If they are not, then we need to adopt a skeptical stance toward the statistics and admit that the policy implications are unclear.<br /><br />Even for solid, unimpeachable data, the policy implications for some measured trend are usually ambiguous. They depend on your assumptions about what is generating those data, your value system, how much weight you put on various costs, etc. VerBruggen is taking the sheer, brute fact of a rising death rate and trying to draw policy implications from this. You can't get an <i>ought</i> from an <i>is</i>.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">What about the fact that efforts to control prescription-pill abuse since 2010 seem to have backfired, driving addicts to dangerous alternatives like heroin and Fentanyl? This is something I discussed in my original piece. It does illuminate the need to consider current addicts when introducing new controls, but it doesn’t suggest loosening controls to begin with is a good idea. By 2010, prescription-opioid overdoses had roughly quadrupled in a decade, the clear result of increased, not limited, supply.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>This is a dodge, and a pretty lame one at that. I've said this before: those fentanyl deaths would not happen in a legal market, because there is no real demand for the stuff. A dealer in a legal market trying to sell fentanyl as heroin would be sued for fraud. Such legal options are taken off the table in a black market.<br /><br /><b>Drug Interactions: Something VerBruggen Misses Entirely</b><br /><br />Something else I've written about at length, but which VerBruggen misses entirely, is the degree to which these "drug overdoses" are actually multi-drug interactions. I have detailed stats on this for the figures from <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/02/cdc-drug-overdose-data-patterns-and.html">2014</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/12/update-on-drug-poisoning-data-for-2015.html">2015</a>, and <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/drug-poisoning-data-2016-update.html">2016</a>. I actually think it's quite misleading to call these "drug overdoses" because such a small proportion of them are single-drug overdoses. Most involve multiple substances. From 2016 (the most recent year for which this detailed data are available), about a third of these involved benzodiazepines. About 13% involved alcohol. About 9% involved antidepressants. Only about 14% of prescription opioid overdoses involved only a single substance. This is a big deal, because once again it illuminates a <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/07/drop-drug-prohibition-issue-specific.html">specific risk factor</a>&nbsp;for policy to target, rather than suggesting blanket prohibition. Once again, prohibition removes a lever of control over this specific problem, but legalization would restore this control. A drug user who has to stand before a pharmacist and ask for recreation-grade opioids could receive a lecture about mixing. The pharmacist could spot someone purchasing multiple potentially interacting substances and warn them against mixing, or (with a little bit of corporate or government intervention) perhaps they could cross-reference their current purchase with recent purchases. Or perhaps they could issue "do not mix" warnings as a matter of policy and print warning labels and recommended dosages on the packaging. VerBruggen mentions "harm reduction" in a favorable light, but supply-side prohibition takes most of the obvious solutions off the table.<br /><br /><b>Opioid Alarmists Have Under-Theorized the Problem</b><br /><b><br /></b>VerBruggen is side-stepping philosophy. He is trying to derive policy implications from brute facts: Opioid prescriptions tripled, and then opioid-related mortality tripled (or perhaps quadrupled or more). But I don't think it's possible to avoid these sticky questions of moral philosophy. Even ducking that, the exact policy prescription depends on the exact mechanism that is causing the death statistics to rise.<br /><br />VerBruggen tells us that the death rate due to opioids rose from six per 100,000 in 1999 to 16 per 100,000 in 2015. Okay. Is 16 per 100,000 a lot? Is it too much? Was six per 100,000 acceptable? Did going from 0.00006 to 0.00016 cross some threshold at which drug prohibition suddenly becomes a good idea? I don't know, and VerBruggen doesn't really tell us. Alarmists like to present the numbers in a way that makes them look big and scary, but every time I've seen these numbers presented as a <i>risk</i>, as some kind of <i>rate per user</i>, they don't look scary at all. Sixteen per 100k of total population? This number would be only very slightly bigger if you divided by the number of total prescriptions in the U.S.; last I checked there were something like 200 million prescriptions annually (compared to ~330 million total people). When I try to place <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-costs-of-drug-use-overdose-risk.html">a dollar estimate</a> on this risk, it seems comparable to what a rational person might pay to avoid a week or so of nagging pain. Even supposing that you divide by a much smaller number, like the number of recreational opioid users or the number of opioid addicts, it doesn't look so bad. It's nothing like the ~4% <i>per year</i> mortality rate for heroin users (from that cause of death alone!).<br /><br />Even the act of dividing by total users and expressing this ratio as the risk per user raises sticky philosophical questions, and I address these in my <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2018/02/law-and-liberty-forum-on-opioids-my.html">response to Caulkins</a>. If, say, 15 out of every 100,000 people has a gene sequence that will cause them to drop dead if they ingest opioids (and supposing it's impossible to test for this, thus making it a true <i>risk</i>&nbsp;rather than a known quantity), then such a risk calculation represents something meaningful. Then again, if you can <i><b>choose</b></i> whether to indulge a foolish impulse to snort or inject your Oxycontin (and, more to the point, do so repeatedly until you have an unmanageable addiction), then dividing by total users is a pointless mathematical exercise. Risk is about unknown possibilities happening by random chance. People can choose by their own free will whether they are exposed to a fatal drug interaction or overdose. (At the very least they can <i>initially</i> choose, and even without <i>this</i> caveat there is some element of choice in the decision to continue using or to abstain.)<br /><br />By what standard should we judge the rise in death rates? From a pure libertarian standard, anything that anyone does with their freedom, <i>so long as they are only harming themselves</i>, is acceptable. From an economic rationality standard, rational actors weigh the costs and benefits of their actions using the best information available to them (they rationally acquire new information until the cost of acquiring more information becomes prohibitive). Thus any action taken is justified according to the actor's own cost-benefit calculus (ignoring externalities, or assuming these are somehow internalized).These both give similar results. Under the libertarian standard, people are morally at liberty to do whatever self-harm they choose to indulge. Under the economic rationality standard, any action taken is recommended by the person's own cost-benefit calculus, and we should be reluctant to second-guess this because third parties cannot observe the person's preferences. You don't have to accept either standard to conclude that prohibition is a good idea, but I should point out that these are the standards that<i> most people</i> apply to <i>most realms</i> of life: choosing a romantic partner, choosing friends, choosing a church, choosing what to read, choosing what to eat, etc.<br /><br />Perhaps a slightly paternalistic standard is appropriate, or even a harshly paternalistic standard: people aren't fully rational, because they underestimate certain costs. We are justified in using force to stop them. The economics on this are pretty clear. Absent making heroic and stilted assumptions, it is essentially impossible to <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/11/against-drug-prohibition.html">deter self-harm</a> in a way that produces a net benefit to society. The harder you hammer self-harmers, the greater the total harm to society. The penalty you impose (either directly on users or indirectly by targeting suppliers) grows much faster than the benefit gained by successfully deterring users. (Don't take my word for it. Take <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/10/excellent-paper-on-economics-of-drug.html">Gary Becker's</a> word for it. Or better yet, read his actual argument.)<br /><br />What about a "fairness" standard of judgment? Suppose restricting access to opioids means that people who really need them can't get them. I think this is terribly unfair. You'd have to be able to deter a lot of abusers for every legitimate pain patient to make this worthwhile, and by all accounts it's the other way around. (See above, regarding the very small proportion of legitimate patients who go on to become abusers.)<br /><br />What about a "personal responsibility" standard? Is it fair to punish manufacturers and dealers because some of their customers do stupid things and kill themselves? (Again, it's become too easy to accidentally overdose because of the fentanyl phenomenon, which is a product of prohibition. That aside, it takes some phenomenally stupid patterns of drug use to actually kill yourself.) I don't think so.<br /><br />How about a "public health" standard, where any increase in illness or mortality is bad and should be decreased at any price, no matter how high. I said above that this is a deranged and immoral standard, but as far as I can tell it's the only one that's consistent with VerBruggen's ultimate policy recommendation to continue supply-side prohibition. (And even then, only <i>given</i> his assumptions about the effectiveness of supply-side prohibition, which are pretty implausible.)<br /><br />What about a utilitarian standard? What counts in our calculus of costs and benefits? Surely <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/pleasure-counts.html">pleasure counts</a>. The notion that people use these substances and continue to use them <i>because they enjoy them</i> is totally lost on drug warriors. How do we begin to count the costs imposed on people involved in the supply chain? Inconvenienced motorists who are stopped and harassed by police. Terrifying SWAT raids on residences, which more often than not turn out to be innocent. Multi-decade prison sentences, often for low-level dealers. Lopsided gender ratios in heavily-policed neighborhoods, leading to a breakdown of family structure. Not to mention the budgetary cost of employing law enforcement and imprisoning drug dealers. The human cost is truly enormous, even if we set aside our moral revulsion and adopt a strict cost-benefit calculus, even if we convert "man-years languishing in prison" to a bland dollar figure. VerBruggen wants it to continue, so apparently he thinks it's worth it. I wish he'd tell us how he got to this answer, because I'm stumped.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">And Andrew I. Cohen made a more philosophical case against continuing the War on Drugs, even if it’s focused on dealers rather than users, emphasizing the seriousness of deploying state power and writing that I have “not quite shown us why such a stark measure is justified here.” On that we can agree to disagree; the incredible rise of opioid-involved fatalities that ensued when we loosened controls on opioids shows, to me, that the state does need to be involved here. And while we can have a discussion about how to treat low-level dealers, I believe criminal sanctions and not just civil fines are certainly needed to deter high-quantity traffickers.</blockquote>Apparently he's endorsing all the horrible things we currently do to drug dealers? I'm left scratching my head here. Nothing in his main essay or his response comes anywhere close to justifying current policy.<br /><br />I was hoping that this forum would lead me to the crux of my disagreement with these "thoughtful prohibitionists." Unfortunately, I'm still confused. Prohibition of any kind does not appear to survive any kind of cost-benefit analysis, based on any serious attempt to quantify and weigh costs and benefits. VerBruggen seems like an incredibly thoughtful journalist. I hope he will reconsider his support for supply-side prohibition. Despite his arriving at good policy prescriptions in a lot of areas specifically regarding drug policy, I think he is deeply misguided on this point.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-61259405592367569302018-02-21T12:28:00.003-08:002018-02-21T12:28:44.342-08:00So You Want To Be Kept As a Pet?[This will not be one of my more thoughtful posts.]<br /><br />When people ask to be protected from competition from foreigners, I imagine they are really saying to the rest of society, "Keep me as a pet." The request for protection comes in two forms: import restrictions (protecting them from people toiling in their home country and shipping us the goods), and immigration restrictions (protecting them from people literally crossing the border and "taking" their job). It's like saying, "I can't compete, and I'm unwilling to take the pay cut necessary to keep doin' what I'm doin'. Please protect me from people who can do the same thing I can do only better and cheaper." It's basically asking the rest of society to subsidize the lifestyle you've grown comfortable with so you don't have to adjust to a changing world.<br /><br />It's like asking the rest of society to "adopt" your factory or office building, pump money into it (even though it's become economically irrelevant or wasteful), and turn it into one of those historic villages where actors wander around trying not to break character while interacting with the tourists. Of course this isn't literally what happens. The propped-up office or factory surely produces some economically meaningful output, which props up the illusion that it's a viable company. But the unfettered economics suggest that the firm should close, and the workers and capital employed by that firm should go into other productive ventures. Propping up these dying businesses halts progress. The churn is sometimes painful, but people do adjust when the inevitable change finally comes. Like Deirdre McCloskey says, economic change is win-win-win-win-win-win-win-lose. The wins outweigh the losses, but eventually you do experience that loss and you adjust, perhaps entering an industry that didn't exist five years ago. To halt the losses is to throw out all those wins, all because a sympathetic-looking interest group asked to be coddled. In the reductio ad absurdum, we're all still toiling farmers plus maybe the rare skilled tradesman. Thank goodness we didn't get stuck there.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-69172355000598108262018-02-21T07:29:00.002-08:002018-02-21T12:10:42.316-08:00Law and Liberty Forum on Opioids: My Reaction to CaulkinsA few months ago, Jeffrey Miron (who has been something of an e-mail pen pal) asked for my commentary on <a href="http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/legalizing-opioids-would-dramatically-reduce-overdoses/">this essay</a> he wrote for Law and Liberty. It's a response to <a href="http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/what-the-opioid-crisis-can-teach-us-about-the-war-on-drugs/">another essay</a> on the same site by Robert VerBruggen. (In my opinion, the VerBruggen piece is incredibly wrong-headed and his narrative is wrong in some pretty basic ways. I'll respond directly to his piece at another time, but I think <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/debunking-standard-narrative-on-opioid.html">my post from last September&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;still holds up well.)<br /><br />There are three other responses, and I'll try to get to each of them in time. For this post, I'll focus on <a href="http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/psychoactive-drugs-in-light-of-libertarian-principles/">this one</a> by Johnathan Caulkins.<br /><br />Caulkins pushes back against the argument that most people who try drugs, even hard drugs, do so responsibly and aren't harmed by them. He recasts the problem from being "proportion of problem users" to "proportion of total use that is problematic." As in, most who people try cocaine don't get hooked. But if you look at the proportion of incidents of cocaine use, or the proportion of cocaine going to problem users, it's very high. Probably a majority by his estimates.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In 1994, Jim Anthony and colleagues published what is still one of the most widely-cited estimates of what proportions of people who ever try various drugs go on to become dependent.[2] Based on data collected between 1990 and 1992 by the National Comorbidity Survey, their estimates for the three major “hard” drugs varied from 11.2 percent for stimulants (which includes methamphetamine but also weaker amphetamine-type-stimulants) to 23.1 percent for heroin. I’ll focus on the proportion for cocaine (16.7 percent) since cocaine was then the most widely used hard drug.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>The 16.7 percent figure does not mean that at any given time five people are enjoying cocaine for every one that is harmed by its use. People who become dependent often suffer through 10 or 20 years of dependence, whereas most of those who do not become dependent use for much less than a decade, and often only quite briefly. So the proportion of days-of-use that pertains to people struggling with dependence is much greater than 16.7 percent.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>He dissects some survey data about how many times cocaine users have used during their lifetime. The result of his back-of-the-envelope calculation appears troubling at first glance:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[T]he odds for the average person who tries cocaine are an expectation of three days of misery per day of harmless fun.</blockquote>Sounds like a pretty bad deal, huh? The implied lesson is that cocaine is more dangerous than it appears according to "addiction per user" ratios.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Thus a naïve interpretation of Anthony et al.’s “capture ratio” is that trying cocaine is like playing Russian roulette, with just one chance in six of disaster. But after recognizing that happy use is transitory and harmful use is long-lasting, the odds are effectively reversed. It is more akin to playing roulette with bullets in five of the pistol’s chambers, not one.</blockquote>Pretty damning, right? I had <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/persistence-of-drug-use.html">just recently written</a> about this topic based on the SAMHSA drug survey data. I had the first-blush common-sense reaction that most drug users don't get hooked and don't persist in their drug use. Caulkins is inviting us to flip the numbers by using a "problematic use per incident of drug use" ratio rather than a "problematic use per user" ratio. I think his analysis is wrong for some basic reasons, and his re-casting to per incident is a mistake.<br /><br />Admittedly this is getting philosophical; I'm not accusing Caulkins of making a factual or mathematical error. But, as Daniel Dennett says, "There is no such thing as philosophy free science. There is only science whose philosophical baggage has been taken on board without examination." So let me briefly play the role of the probing, groping TSA agent and see if Caulkins has inadvertently snuck something past us. Let's examine away.<br /><br /><b>Free Will</b><br /><br />First of all, doing something that's potentially habit-forming is <i>not</i> like a game of Russian roulette. There isn't a flipping coin, tumbling die, roulette wheel, or spinning barrel of a six-shooter inside our heads. Human beings are sentient. They consciously&nbsp;<i>decide</i> whether to take risks or avoid them. They consciously (or unconsciously) weigh costs and benefits. The person who gets hooked on cocaine makes a series of decisions. An initial decision: "Hmm. I've heard this thing has a bad reputation. I'll try it anyway." As Caulkins himself concedes, most people make it through this step unscathed. There is a subsequent decision to use <i>again</i>: "That felt really good, I think I'll repeat." Or (again, far more typical): "No thanks." Somewhat paradoxically, a really good first experience can lead to a total swearing off. Drug users often quite rationally recognize that a continued dalliance with the pleasant substance might result in a habit that's hard to control. A sort of "That was good. <i>Too</i> good." reaction. Someone has to really indulge repeatedly and quite deliberately to turn it into a bad habit.<br /><br />See my post on <i><a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/unbroken-brain.html">Unbroken Brain </a></i>for more of these details on drug addiction. Drug users are mostly rational; they don't get ensnared in the "chemical hooks" of the substances they imbibe. I'll admit that it would be pig-headed of me to try to ignore (in my argument) the temptations imposed by chemical dependence and the fact that some people find these temptations irresistible. I think it's equally pig-headed to ignore the fact that most people with a chemical dependence do in fact overcome their addictions and get their lives in order. They <i>choose</i> to do so. They <i>decide</i> to make the change, despite the temptation. I'm not denying the existence of drug addiction or ducking the point here. I'm just trying to put some proper context around the phenomenon of drug addiction.<br /><br /><b>Caulkins Dismisses Too Many Causal Users</b><br /><br />Caulkins presents a useful table showing a breakdown of how many times "lifetime users" of cocaine have actually used. 29% only once or twice; 16% three to five times; 15% six to ten times. (The survey asked on how many days they used, not how many times they used; an evening-long coke-binge in which you bumped 20 times counts as one day of use.) So fully 60% of "lifetime users" have only used it ten or fewer times. As long as Caulkins would grant that the "not even once" propaganda is overblown nonsense, I'll grant that we might want to ignore people who have only touched the stuff a few times. This population was likely never "at risk" because they never used persistently enough. (Then again, see my caveat above about drug users rationally swearing off something that's "too good" after only one or a few uses. I have heard second-hand stories about people doing this, so it can't be too uncommon. Such persons might even describe themselves as having once been "dependent.")<br /><br />But Caulkins takes this way too far. He points out that anti-tobacco activists ignore people who have smoked on fewer than 100 occasions. That makes perfectly good sense to me with respect to tobacco. But consider someone who used cocaine 20 times. That could be one coke-fueled outing every weekend for the better part of half a year, or every other weekend for the better part of a year. Someone in that category could be said to have dabbled significantly. And someone who does imbibe with that kind of frequency might develop a mild "dependence" or at least a craving for the habit. That's not really frequent enough to do serious cumulative damage (long-term cocaine use damages the heart, among other things). But they might be represented in the "16.7%" figure that Caulkins cites. I think Caulkins is loading his figures by trying to dismiss the all but 14% who have used on 100 or more days in their life. The 40% who have used 10 or more times are fully in play, in my opinion.<br /><br />From the paper that the 16.7% figure comes from:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[D]ependence was assessed whenever participants reported at least several occasions of extramedical drug use, under the assumption that even as few as six occasions might be sufficient for development of drug dependence, but that drug dependence would be extremely rare or improbable among persons who had used the drug no more than several times.</blockquote><b>There Are Gradations of "Dependence"</b><br /><br />Caulkins invites us to imagine worst-case scenarios:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">People who become dependent often suffer through 10 or 20 years of dependence, whereas most of those who do not become dependent use for much less than a decade, and often only quite briefly.</span></span></blockquote>"Often?" How often? Half the time? Once in every ten? Dependence is just like any other social problem. There is a distribution of severity, with the <i>most severe</i> instances being the&nbsp;<i>least</i> common. The better part of the 16.7% are probably people who remember using a little too much, or perhaps remember a few genuine problems caused by their drug use which quickly prompted them to stop. Most people who become full-fledged addicts age out of it by their late 20s or early 30s. A decade is a typical tenure for someone who's already become an addict, according to various other sources I've read (<i>Unbroken Brain</i>, <i>High Price,</i>&nbsp;sorry I don't have specific academic references handy for this "stylized fact").<br /><br />His comment about "three days of misery per day of harmless fun" is more than a little bit hyperbolic. No doubt some addicts are completely miserable. But I'll bet that many of the people who strictly meet the criteria for "dependence" still at least somewhat enjoy their habit, even if they recognize it's bad and wish they would stop.<br /><br /><b>Selection Bias</b><br /><br />It's worth keeping in mind (as Caulkins quite appropriately reminds us about halfway down the page) that this data comes from within a regime of drug prohibition. The sample of individuals who imbibe in a prohibition regime is <i>very different</i> from the sample who would imbibe under full legalization. These are people who are disproportionately likely to be risk-takers. By definition, they are people who choose to break the law. We are constantly inundated with information about how dangerous and addictive these substances are. Pause and think about what kind of person ignores these warnings and imbibes anyway.&nbsp; People who have impulse control problems are going to be over-represented in this sample of the population. People who don't generally have their lives together (unmarried, marginally employed, no dependents or perhaps neglectful of their existing dependents) will be over-represented here. If you have a normal job and family life, certain patterns of drug use are ruled out of the question. If you look at a population where these things are missing, you're going to see a disproportionate number of addicts and persistent drug users. Of course <i>most</i> people who have been users (even of hard drugs) are not dysfunctional, but any population of illegal users is going to have disproportionate numbers of dysfunctional adults. You can't simply apply numbers from this population to the general population and speculate that it's a reasonable estimate for what would happen under full legalization.<br /><br /><b>The Substances Themselves Differ Under Prohibition Versus Legalization</b><br /><b><br /></b>Bolivian Indians chew coca leaf all day long. They do not inexorably escalate to powdered cocaine or crack. Presumably this is closer to the model of "legal cocaine use." Or look at another class of stimulants. Compare attention deficit disorder medications to methamphetamine. They are substantially the same substances (in fact government surveys and death statistics count them in the same category!), but school&nbsp; children with ADD prescriptions spend significant portions of their day (<i>every</i> day) under their influence. They don't inexorably escalate to smoking or injecting methamphetamine.<br /><br />Under legalization, there would likely be some coca tea drinkers and perhaps leaf chewers (lozenges? nasal sprays? tinctures?). But few would escalate to pure powdered cocaine. We likely would not have many more intense users than we currently have. More likely, we'd fill in the lower-dose-but-more-frequent-use left tail of the distribution, which full-fledged prohibition chops off. It's doubtful that the right-tail of intense frequent use would expand much if at all. You might get the occasional tea drinker who occasionally mixes his brew strong enough to get a mild buzz, much like the caffeine buzz you'd get from a tall cup of Starbucks.<br /><br />The distribution of "days used in lifetime" would probably expand rightward, putting more people in the categories of more frequent use. At that point, we could talk about dropping people who used on 100 or fewer days. But I think that kind of data-censoring is inappropriate given the regime the data comes from.<br /><br /><b>Adjusting for Implausible Results</b><br /><b><br /></b>Look at <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/60cd/d49b5ed6a84423762a366727ae4880c6f255.pdf">the paper</a> that the 16.7% figure comes from. See Table 2 on the 8th page of the document. So supposedly 4.9% of past psychedelic users developed a dependence? 9.1% of marijuana users? Some kind of "<strike>bullshit</strike>&nbsp;implausibility adjustment factor" needs to be applied here. Psychedelics and marijuana don't cause physical dependence or withdrawal. Any perceived dependence is psychological, and no more concerning than an "addiction" to video games. Maybe these drugs were the vehicle by which some people chose to harm their lives, but it would be unfair to blame the drugs for the problems of people with poor impulse control or other unrelated problems. I made this point on my "Persistence of Drug Use" post (linked to above).<br /><br />I think what's going on here is that people are recalling their drug use as a "youthful indiscretion". Perhaps many of them are embarrassed about their former habit and recall it as being more harmful than it really was. Supposedly there were quality control checks in place to get accurate measures of "dependence" according to the DSM III definition (read the paper for details). But the psychedelic and marijuana numbers indicate, to me at least, that some kind of misreporting is creeping in. People who are asked about their drug use, <i>years</i> later when they are older and wiser, likely misreport how bad it was.<br /><br /><b>Picking the Relevant Base for "Exposure"</b><br /><br />I'm an actuary, so I'm keenly aware of the problem of "picking the relevant exposure base." If I have a population of 1000 cars, all else equal it will have twice the accidents as a population of 500 cars. If I have a sample of 1000 cars for 2 years, all else equal there will be twice as many accidents as 1000 cars for 1 year. In fact "car-years" is a standard unit of exposure. Then again, I could pick "households" as my basis for exposure. Some households have an old beater than never gets driven plus two or three cars for regular use. The old beater isn't as exposed to risk as the others. Not all car-years are created equally, but then again neither are all households created equally. Perhaps I could use "miles driven." A car that drives twice as many miles, all else equal, will have twice as many accidents. But highway miles are safer than city miles. So maybe "equivalent highway miles driven", something that re-casts all miles driven to an equivalent number of highway miles. Or maybe I just use "vehicle-years" and adjust each individual exposure for risk factors: the guy who drives 6000 miles and the guy who drives 1000 miles each gets one "car-year" of exposure, but the first guy gets a factor of six adjustment when I calculate his accident risk.<br /><br />There are different ways of doing this, some equivalent to others. But I think using "incidents of use" or "days of active use" as the exposure for "risk of addiction" stacks the deck in a way that a "per lifetime user" basis does not. Likewise, most casino-goers don't have to worry about developing a gambling addiction. But if you recast your base as "per dollar gambled", you'll find a much larger proportion (maybe a majority?) are being gambled by people with gambling problems. If you're trying to assess a priori risk, you want an exposure base that <i>causes</i> the risk to rise linearly as the exposure rises. It would be silly to use, say, "dollars of insurance claims paid" as my exposure base, because this restricts us to automobiles that have already been involved in accidents. Likewise, the problem with addiction is that if you do it a little too much, you will become "captured" and end up doing it a lot too much. The if the exposure base for the social problem you are trying to measure (be it auto accidents or drug addiction) skyrockets when a problem occurs, it's a bad exposure base.<br /><br />I'll applaud Caulkins for raising an interesting point about what basis to use, but I don't think it's at all clear that the "per days of use" basis is the relevant one. It depends on the question you're trying to answer. "I'm offered cocaine for the first time. Should I try it?" I think the "per lifetime user" basis is the relevant one for answering this question. "I've tried before, and I have the opportunity to acquire some tonight. Should I?" Maybe the "per use" basis starts to look more relevant for this kind of question, especially for the tenth or 20th offering. I think the "per days of use" basis comes dangerously close to being a tautology. Caulkins cuts off the left tail of the distribution (too much so, I argued above) by claiming that those infrequent users aren't really exposed to addiction. Then, having censored the data to only include the right tail of the distribution, he argues that most of this cocaine use is done by people with addiction issues. Of course he brings in data on what fraction of lifetime users experienced dependence (the 16.7% figure cited above), so it's not literally a tautology. But if frequent, persistent use is part of the definition of dependence, we're still trapped inside a tautology. As in, "Let's define persistent, repeated use as problematic. Oh my goodness! Low and behold, most drug use is problematic!" Breaking the tautology depends on the independence of the "drug dependence" question and the "persistent use" question. If these are strongly linked <i>by definition</i>, as I suspect they are, we're stuck in tautology world.<br /><br />By the way, this is hard. I struggled with the issue of "what exposure base to use" in a <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/06/age-is-major-risk-factor-in-drug.html">previous post</a>. Suppose I want to know the mortality of cocaine users. Are the "past year users" all at risk? Or just the "past month users" who presumably have a more serious and persistent habit? Let me just reiterate that I am not at all faulting Caulkins for raising this issue.<br /><b><br /></b><b>It's Hard to Deter Self-Harm</b><br /><br />Suppose I'm wrong about everything and cocaine use really is the three-to-one game of Russian roulette that Caulkins thinks it is. Does that support the notion of drug prohibition? Of course not.<br /><br />The problem with <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/11/against-drug-prohibition.html">drug prohibition</a> is that it eats its own tail. It requires the <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/02/drug-prohibition-requires-implausible.html">implausible dueling assumptions</a> that drug users are irrational enough to ignore the risks of drug use, but rational enough to be deterred by legal penalties and the paltry price increase imposed by prohibition. ("Paltry" because the full price includes all those nasty risks <i>in addition to</i> the actual dollar price tag.) If you <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-modest-sandwich-tax-economics-of.html">actually </a>try to <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/02/demand-response-to-vice-prohibition.html">model this out</a>&nbsp;by stating your assumptions clearly, you find that it doesn't work. Someone who is willing to play a 3-to-1 game of Russian roulette is someone who is not going to be deterred by a legal slap on the wrist, an increase in the market price (even a severe one), or the search costs required to find a dealer. If the bulk of the "cost" of cocaine use is embodied in the inherent pharmacological cost (risk of addiction and self-harm from continued use), then drug prohibition is unlikely to meaningfully deter these users. He cites the example of marijuana legalization leading to a massive increase in daily usage, but this is a distraction. Marijuana is not harmful or addictive, so it's actually plausible that prohibition causes significant deterrence. The legal penalties, higher market price, etc., are a <i>significant component</i> of the total cost in the case of marijuana. Not so in the case of cocaine, if we're to believe Caulkins' estimates of the risk of addiction. Make whatever assumptions you like about drug users, but<i> keep those assumptions consistent</i>. They're irrational? Cool, I can buy that. Then they won't be rationally deterred by anti-drug laws. They're rational after all? Cool, then their drug use must be a rational decision that you simply fail to understand. They rationally respond to legal sanctions while irrationally responding to the pharmacological risks? No, now you are confused. Specify what the demand curve looks like, but once you've done so stick with it and spell out the implications.<br /><br />Caulkins wrote a very thoughtful essay, and it has given me quite a lot to think about. I just don't buy his bottom line (about cocaine, anyway). I'll try to respond to other essays in the Law and Liberty forum as I have time.<br /><br /><b>Addendum</b><br /><br />I felt a need to respond to this part of his essay:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Second, I concede that prohibition harms many people, probably more than it helps. However, it harms most of them only modestly, whereas some whom it protects benefit enormously.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>This strikes me as a pretty blithe dismissal of the suffering caused by drug prohibition. Are we shifting back to a per-person exposure base? I guess if the median person "harmed by drug prohibition" is the casual user who can't score any, or (to use an even broader base) the tax payer saddled with the bill for a useless and ineffective drug war, this statement is literally true. But just as there is a thick right tail to the distribution of cocaine-related harms, there is a thick right tail to the distribution of drug-war related harms. That is, there are infrequent but severe cases of harm that likely dominate the total harm, by any reasonable accounting. Let's fixate on the innocent people whose homes are unnecessarily raided, the people languishing in prison because they triggered a mandatory minimum over an arbitrary weight limit, the families destroyed by the incarceration of their loved ones, the communities destroyed because incarceration has imposed a lopsided male/female ratio, the people overdosing on heroin or cocaine tainted with fentanyl (yes, that is the fault of drug prohibition, as much as the drug warriors would love to take a pass on this one).<br /><br />Pardon me for dwelling on this, but what a lopsided comparison. Read the second sentence in that excerpt again. Are we comparing the median person "harmed" (implied by his use of the phrase "most of them") to the very most extreme cases of "drug abuse averted" (implied by his use of the phrase "some of whom")? If we do a proper cost-benefit analysis, weighing all costs against all benefits, Caulkins would have a very hard time justifying cocaine prohibition.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-58738143874809679862018-02-17T14:42:00.001-08:002018-02-17T14:42:36.145-08:00Thomas Sowell’s Farewell Letter to His Secretary<br /><div class="MsoNormal">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Man of Letters</i>, Thomas Sowell publishes many of his personal letters. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>It is a very engaging read, and it gives you a real flavor for<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>his thinking and his influences.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One letter is to his secretary Beverly, who recently quit (retired?). It's clear from Sowell's very heartfelt letter that he is sad to see her go:<o:p></o:p></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">I am of course very sorry to lose a very good secretary. But I have also gotten to know you somewhat over the past year or so, and if I may consider myself a friend, then as a friend I think you may have made the best decision. Just this past weekend I expressed my concern to my wife that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you seemed to be making the job far harder on yourself than it needed to be, partly by trying to shape my decisions instead of simply getting me the information that I needed to make my own decisions.</i></b> She suggested that I take you to lunch and air our different conceptions of the work. But, by the time I reached the office on Monday, you had made your decision.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Emphasis mine. I think this is a common employer-employee dynamic. The employee is trying too hard to shape the decision-making (beyond their actual mandate to do so), while the employer just wants the necessary information to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">make</i> a decision. Sometimes it’s even cynical. The employee tries to influence the employer toward the decision that will require the least effort and headache (for the employee). The employer senses this and has to push back through the employee’s manipulation and stonewalling. Sometimes it’s sheer ego, as in the employee thinks they know better and wants to be the boss. And of course sometimes the employee does know better, and the boss’s boneheaded decision really does blow up in everyone’s face even though s/he tried to warn him. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is a slightly different variation of <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2018/01/tight-lipped-subordinate.html">something I wrote about</a> in a recent post. It’s not specific to work relationships, either. I think it could be at play in any power dynamic (parent-child) or even between equals (partners in a firm or project). I feel like I’ve been on both sides of this conflict.<o:p></o:p></div><br />Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-8970227651486485322018-02-17T14:25:00.004-08:002018-02-17T14:25:51.086-08:00Some Quick Advice<br /><div class="MsoNormal">Download a couple of good podcasts that you want to listen to. You’re reading my blog at this moment, right? Surely there is some podcast that’s just as good. Or maybe an audiobook or some talks or lectures on Youtube. Or maybe even some music. Got it? Awesome. Your opportunity cost for doing household chores is now very close to zero. You can wash dishes or clean the cat litter or declutter the surfaces in your home or dust or do laundry or clean bathrooms. Your spouse will appreciate it, and you’ll feel productive. You might even feel good about doing it. I usually end up enjoying the feeling when I’m immersed in a productive task, even something simple like house work. The "switching cost" or "activation energy" (getting started in other words) is sometimes rough, but once something gets started it's not that bad. It doesn't feel like work. Go forth! Sometimes I even take my own advice on this one.&nbsp;</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-34158477220055582322018-02-17T14:15:00.003-08:002018-02-17T14:15:13.706-08:00The Power of Mutual KnowledgeThere’s a puzzle <a href="http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/12/brain-teaser/">I first encountered</a> on Steven Landsburg’s blog “The Big Questions.” It involves an island of 100 blue-eyed and 100 brown-eyed natives being visited by a foreigner. There is a strictly observed religious tradition to never talk about anyone else’s eye-color, and to commit ritual suicide within a day if you ever discover your own eye color. (There are no reflective surfaces on the island.) But of course everyone can see everyone else’s eye color. Everyone with blue eyes knows there are at least 99 blue-eyed people and 100 brown-eyed people, just as everyone with brown eyes knows there are at least 99 brown-eyed people and 100 blue-eyed people. They just don’t know their own eye color. A foreigner (who happens to have blue eyes) arrives by boat, spends several months visiting and learning their ways, then sails away. Just as he leaves, he says, “Well, how interesting that there would be blue-eyed people in this part of the world!” And he sails off.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">At first glance, he didn’t tell them anything. “Of course, everybody already knew that there are blue eyed people on the island! The foreigner’s statement adds no information.” But if you work through the puzzle, you discover the surprising result that everyone commits ritual suicide on the 100<sup>th</sup> day. It's a subtle story about mutual knowledge slowly creeping in and eventually having horrendous consequences. (Note that Landsburg is making a very different point than I am.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I have two dueling thoughts on this. My first thought is, “This is way too complicated for anyone to actually figure out. Nobody is smart enough to actual work this out and figure out their own eye-color. In the real world, everyone would be safe.” <o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">My second thought is, “Social life is unimaginably more complex than a simple rule about eye-color and ritual suicide. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Of course</i> people are constantly working out complex implications of mutual knowledge. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Of course</i> blurting shit out makes people uncomfortable. It may only 'reveal' information that everybody knows. But it reveals that <i>everybody knows</i> that everybody knows that everybody knows, ad infinitum.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Imagine saying something unflattering about a coworker. “Everyone in this room knows you’re not qualified.” Everyone, including the accused, might already know, and everyone might suspect that everyone else already thinks it. But plausible deniability has been taken away. Now every time this coworker looks someone in the eye, he’ll see shame staring back at him. The boss, who was willing to tolerate the under-performer out of pity, doesn't have plausible deniability when someone asks, "How can you keep him on your team?" The coworker who was picking up the under-performer's slack feels emasculated if he continues. Everyone could live with the uncomfortable truth before it became mutual knowledge. It doesn't have to be such an obvious accusation, either. More in line with the puzzle, it could be a snippy comment about <i>someone</i> not carrying his weight. It's obvious enough who the target was, so mutual knowledge seeps in.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You could think of other examples. You're in a group of friends, two of whom have an obvious mutual crush, and perhaps another friend in the group is jealous. Maybe everyone knows this dynamic exists, and maybe everyone suspects that everyone else knows. But blurting it out would be really uncomfortable. Even someone who indirectly hinted at it (perhaps with a light joke or teasing) might be scolded or shamed for creating an awkward moment. If you don't viscerally feel the discomfort of this scenario, think about how the group might split into factions. The jealous rival might feel compelled by shame to avoid the flirting couple. Other friends might feel compelled to choose between factions. Even when everybody knows and everybody suspects that everybody knows, everyone still has plausible deniability.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />In the same vein, merely stating that "some people" have cynical attitudes and do illicit activities may implicate you. In an alternative version of the puzzle given above, there is a society of 100 couples. Every husband cheats on his wife, and every wife knows about every infidelity of <i>every other</i> woman's husband (just not her own). In this version, she must murder her husband within 24 hours if she figures out he is a cheater. By the same logic as the blue-eyed and brown-eyed islander story, if some incautious outsider blurts out what everyone already knows, something awful happens. On day 100, all the cheating husbands die.&nbsp;<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This isn't about trivial matters of social faux pas and embarrassment. Dictators don't like crowds, because crowds tend to turn into angry protests. And these reveal to the world that, yes, everyone else is dissatisfied with the status quo. It's hard to maintain the fiction of a "100% approval rating" or a "bountiful harvest" in the light of this kind of public demonstration. Nicolae Ceausescu was brought down when people started chanting at a public speech and he lost control of the audience. The Arab Spring seems like another example of this. Why wouldn't Hosni Mubarak just sit in office and hold power? Why not just ignore the protesters and wait it out, like American presidents do all the time? I think this "mutual knowledge" dynamic is at play and cracks the armor of a dictatorship much more than it does in a democracy.<br /><br />I am stealing some of these ideas about mutual knowledge from a Steven Pinker book, though at this point I couldn't even tell you which one. <i>The Blank Slate</i>? Or maybe it was <i>How the Mind Works</i>.<br /><br />Are there other good examples of this dynamic at work?<br />________________________________</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Think about an island with one blue-eyed and one brown-eyed person. On this island, the foreigner’s statement would cause the blue-eyed person to discover his eye-color. The blue-eyed person knows that the other person’s eyes are brown. Knowing he must be the blue-eyed person, he commits ritual suicide. The brown eyed person, seeing this, realizes that he must have brown eyes, or the blue-eyed person wouldn’t have discovered his eye-color and killed himself. “If I had blue eyes, he would have waited a day..”<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Now think about an island with two blue-eyed and two brown-eyed people. The blue-eyed people know there’s at least one blue-eyed person. The brown-eyed people know there are at least two blue-eyed people. The foreigner’s statement might first cause each blue-eyed person to think, “Oh, he’s talking about that blue-eyed person. If that blue-eyed person sees three brown-eyed people he’ll commit ritual suicide within 24 hours. If not…” So when the blue-eyed person <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doesn’t </i></b>commit ritual suicide within 24 hours, the other blue eyed person says, “Uh, oh. He was talking about both of us!” This is symmetric. They both commit ritual suicide. The brown-eyed people have worked this out, too, and so they know there were 2 blue-eyed people, not three. This allows them to work out that they must both have brown eyes.<o:p></o:p><br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Now think about an island with 3 blue-eyed and 3 brown-eyed people…work this one out yourself. By induction, this process keeps going. “On the Xth day, all X blue eyed and all X brown-eyed people commit ritual suicide.” And all because one loud-mouth visitor blurted something out. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></div><br />Or think about it this way. Obviously if there's only one blue eyed person on the island, the foreigner's statement that there's a blue-eyed person reveals that person's eye color to him. Ritual suicide.<br />Given this, if there are two blue-eyed people, the foreigner's statement will reveal that there's at least one blue-eyed person. On day 2, each blue eyed person works out that the other sees a blue-eyed instead of a brown-eyed person and commits ritual suicide.<br />Given this, if there are three blue-eyed people, after day 2 each blue-eyed person works out that there must be three blue-eyed people.<br />And so on. There's no magic number where this induction stops working.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-31564848380476688222018-02-15T10:14:00.000-08:002018-02-15T10:14:19.960-08:00The Wikipedia TestThe "illusion of explanatory depth" confuses us into thinking we understand things at a deeper level than we really do. Simple stuff like "How does a tiolet work" or "How does a bicycle work" tends to stump us when we're asked specific questions about the mechanisms. Same goes for political topics and things on the news.<br /><br />A decent test of your understanding is to look up the Wikipedia (or good ole' encyclopedia) entry for a topic that you have strong opinions about, and see if there's anything that's mind-bogglingly surprising to you. If you're finding a lot of surprises, and they seem to check out (check references! The Wikipedia is fallible!), then you probably didn't understand the topic as well as you thought.<br /><br />I <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/12/oil-pipelines-and-rule-of-law.html">remember</a> reading the Dakota Access pipeline Wikipedia page and being floored by the extent to which the builders had received voluntary easements. Apparently, to a very large number of people whose properties were affected, this was a pretty unobjectionable project (given appropriate compensation). I wish the people waxing wroth on my Facebook feed would have gone through this exercise. It might not have made them "pro-pipeline", but it would have made them re-think whether this was the world's greatest injustice.<br /><br />Or do "the Google test". Simply look up the first few Google hits. Maybe search for "best arguments for/against..." Again, if there are a lot of surprises here, consider that maybe you need to do some reading, because you didn't understand your topic so well after all. I recently found that it was very easy to get the canonical list of supposed "non-neutrality" transgressions by internet service providers. I also found that this list <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2018/01/bad-examples-of-net-non-neutrality.html">completely falls apart </a>when you look at the examples in any detail.<br /><br />Maybe I'm mistaken about these topics. But the exercise of doing some&nbsp;research (<i>even cursory</i>&nbsp;research)&nbsp;on the topic that excites you is bound to yield some interesting surprises. Pick something that's been in the news, something you think you understand well, and start digging.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-61773652035755480372018-02-15T10:07:00.001-08:002018-02-15T10:07:44.139-08:00Latent Knowledge and Maps of KnowledgeBryan Caplan’s latest book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Case Against Education</i>, is very engrossing. Also depressing. The most depressing piece of the book is the section that describes just how much we forget. When tested even months after the final exam, people seem to have lost most of what they learned.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m skeptical. I’ll start by describing my experience with the actuarial exams. These are four-hour exams that people typically spend four or five months studying for. (The pass rate is something like 50% for a <i>good</i> sitting.) There is a broad syllabus covering, say, 15 to 25 papers or textbook chapters. I would be able to work my way through the entire syllabus maybe four or five times in my 4+ months of study.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the first pass through, it literally feels like you learn <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing at all</i></b>. You read over the paper and an associated study guide, look at some practice problems, and go “Huh?” Almost nothing sticks. It’s hard to conceive of any test that would pick up the meager knowledge-gain of this first pass-through. Maybe you could vaguely detect that students pick up a concept or two on this first pass. Thoroughly confused, you move on to the next paper, and so on until you’ve done a first pass for everything in the syllabus.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On the second pass, you think, “Oh, this looks mildly familiar. But I don’t remember what the hell any of this is about.” But something magical happens. You say, “I understand it now.” You do a little bit better on some of the practice problems. Then you move on to the next paper, for which you find yourself having a similar “Ah ha” experience.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So plainly it isn’t possible that I learned <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing at all</i> on the first pass-through. I would have loved to skip straight to the “Ah ha” of the second pass. I would have paid a fortune to skip that painful, humbling, slogging first pass. But plainly I had to go through this step. Clearly I was learning <i>something</i> that allowed the second pass to be more profitable. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I think much of what we learn and then forget is like this. I couldn’t necessarily pass any of my college or grad school physics exams. But I can pick it up again if I ever need to. More to the point, I can pick it up quickly and easily without a first slogging pass through it. I wonder how important this “latent knowledge-building” truly is. I’ve learned subject matter that I had never studied in school, so it might not be all that important after all. Surely someone has studied this concept. I wonder if Caplan came across any research on it? It seems like <a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/david_balan_rev.html">some critics</a> of his book have brought it up, but I’m not sure Caplan has referred to research exploring/debunking this latent knowledge theory of education. <o:p></o:p></div><br />In addition to this latent knowledge, maybe we retain "maps of knowledge" after we forget the bulk of the subject matter. I may not remember how to do all varieties of calculus problems, but I know whether some problem I come across calls for an integration or a Lagrange multiplier. I can look up the appropriate textbook chapter. (BTW, I may have that rare one job in ten thousand that ever calls for these things, and then only rarely, and <i>even then</i> I use a computer to do it for me after setting up the problem.) It probably helps to "know your way around a topic." Then again, to Caplan's <a href="http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/02/bryan_caplan_on_1.html">recent Econtalk exchange</a> with Russ Roberts, you could probably design a test for this. "Which technique is most appropriate for this problem..." "Which textbook would you reach for if presented with this problem..."<br /><br />None of this impugns Caplan's overall thesis. I still think we're all over-schooled, we forget too much, and we waste time on silly or useless topics. Caplan's guess that education is 80% signalling is probably a good estimate. Those actuarial exams I mentioned? 90% useless. It's just another long vetting process. "Can you pass these exams? (Stamps forehead with "Grade A".) Awesome, you get to be an actuary! Can you pass <i>these</i> exams, too? (Stamps forehead with "Grade AA".) Cool, you get an <i>even better</i> job as an actuary!" Or maybe I'm wrong and the latent knowledge and knowledge maps are really important. I just get the strong sense that most of the official actuarial<br />&nbsp;syllabus is rarely or never used.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-7660944151591138882018-02-15T06:22:00.000-08:002018-02-15T06:22:27.581-08:00Cass Sunstein's New BookCass Sunstein has a new book coming out called <i>Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America</i>. This is precious. A while ago, he wrote a piece in Bloomberg called <i>How to Spot a Paranoid Libertarian</i>. Arnold Kling <a href="http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/paranoia-along-three-axes/">linked to it</a> at the time and I read it. I can't seem to open it now because it's behind Bloomberg's paywall. But I <a href="http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/paranoia-along-three-axes/#comment-384452">commented on it</a> and quoted pieces of it. Quotes surround excerpts from Sunstein's Bloomberg piece, the rest is my commentary on it.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">“ In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.”<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>I thought Cass Sunstein was supposed to understand the notion of “risk,” but reading this passage and the rest of his essay I get the sense that he doesn’t at all. A risk doesn’t have to manifest itself as a bad outcome to be real. Risk is about the possibility of bad outcomes, some of which are realized and some of which are not. At what point is there a “good reason for their conviction?” By the time something terrible has already happened? Libertarians argue for a very good risk management strategy: don’t create the levers of power in the first place if they may be abused.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>“The fourth characteristic is an indifference to trade-offs — a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value…”<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>This passage also irritated me. Statists have a very hard time justifying their favorite government programs with any kind of cost-benefit analysis, even the ones who consider themselves part of the scientific enlightenment. It’s generally libertarians who want to do this kind of analysis. Doing so tends to lead to libertarian conclusions. Very few government programs survive an honest cost-benefit analysis; they persist in spite of failing utterly to justify their own costs. To be charitable, maybe he’s specifically criticizing a very specific sub-sect of libertarianism. But my overall impression is that he’s casting libertarianism as a mental defect. His readers will come away with the impression “libertarians are paranoid,” even if his intention is to say something more subtle.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>That's my full comment, but only the first half is relevant to this post. I just thought the casting of libertarianism as "paranoid" was off the mark, especially for someone who studies risk (and perceptions of risk and irrational risk and so on). Libertarianism is, in one sense, a safeguard against really bad possible outcomes that don't usually manifest themselves. We wish to constrain government knowing that really bad outcomes <i>might</i> happen. You don't give the government more power and more control just because, ad hoc and one-day-at-a-time, it appears to pass a cost-benefit test. (Well...the very tilted kind of cost-benefit test that always seems to favor the government, according to the government's own accounting by government-employed economists and policy analysts.) For example, requiring blogs to <a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/08/time_out_from_p.html#">link to contrary viewpoints</a>&nbsp;(do read the link to the end; Sunstein changed his mind on this one, to his credit).<br /><br />I haven't read the book yet. (It's actually a collection of essays, one of which is written by him.) Maybe he gives a "No" answer, so there's no contradiction or hypocrisy here. And I can't re-read the Bloomberg piece right now; maybe it's more nuanced than I remember and I'm being totally unfair. But if he's suddenly saying that authoritarianism is a huge threat, I think that makes his past smear of libertarian "paranoia" extremely hypocritical. If I get a chance to read his contribution to this book, I'll report back.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-78539286036364807892018-02-14T10:56:00.003-08:002018-02-15T06:31:43.308-08:00Tyler Cowen's Teetotaling Blind-SpotTyler Cowen is a great economist and an incredibly thoughtful writer. But sometimes he gets things totally wrong. One of his major blind-spots is drug prohibition (even <i>alcohol</i> prohibition). It's not that he's in favor of it, as far as I can tell. But he downplays the likely benefits and exaggerates the hazards of relaxing prohibition.<br /><br /><a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/legal-marijuana-potent.html">Here he is</a>&nbsp;in a recent post&nbsp;on marijuana legalization. He's linking to a Washington Post piece that supposedly argues against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition">iron law of prohibition</a>: Drug concentrations rise under prohibition. People substitute from opium and morphine to heroin and (more recently) fentanyl. People consume whisky and gin instead of beer and wine. The post uses the example of recent marijuana prohibition to "disprove" this iron law. But I think it really misses the mark. At best it shows that <i>sometimes</i> drug concentrations can rise rather than fall after legalization. But clearly there is some truth to the notion that smugglers prefer a product that is less bulky. A bootlegger can carry ten times as much hard liquor as beer. A heroin dealer can shrink a one-ton shipment down to the <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/07/fentanyl-and-other-super-opioids.html">size of a suitcase</a> (or even a vial, depending on what class of synthetic opioid we're talking about!).<br /><br />Marijuana seems completely different from these other substances. Some clever smuggler <i>could</i> conceivably distill pure THC to make it less bulky, but I'm not sure there would be much of a market for it. (Would typical marijuana smokers want, say, pure THC spritzed onto dried oregano? I'm thinking the market for this is thin.) Or maybe a clever cultivator could figure out how to grow a more potent strain. Then again, in an illegal market these strains would constantly be getting intercepted and disrupted by law enforcement. It would be hard to accumulate or share knowledge of this sort in an illegal market. Black-market "capital" keeps getting intercepted and destroyed. Low-grade illegal weed, bulky as it is, is probably "strong enough" for the typical user in a way that these other substances just aren't. In a legal market, cultivators can preserve potent strains and preserve the knowledge of how to grow them. This seems like a bigger deal for marijuana (where the dried plant is smoked directly) than for cocaine and heroin (where the dried plant is heavily processed and concentrated before being delivered to the user).<br /><br />A couple things from that post struck me. Citing a study of marijuana in the Netherlands:<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">The researchers estimated that for every 3 percent increase in THC, roughly one more person per 100,000 in the population would seek marijuana use disorder treatment for the first time.</blockquote>One additional person per 100,000 seems like a pathetically small effect. The study in question sees concentrations ranging from 8.6% to 20.3%. Increasing across this entire range would mean an additional 4 people per 100k seeking "use disorder treatment" (rounding up here a little). We're not even talking about something serious like "mortality" here. "Marijuana use disorder?" It's not addictive in the ways that other drugs are. You don't develop the dependence, withdrawals, or physical cravings. It's addictive in the way that video games are addictive. If four more people per 100k seeks treatment, that's a pretty low price to pay. Something like <a href="https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics">7% of Americans</a> have an alcohol use disorder. If there is <i>any</i> appreciable substitution from alcohol to marijuana, this price is well worth it. Eighty-eight thousand Americans succumb to alcohol-related deaths each year. That's 27 per 100k, not "seeking treatment for alcohol use disorder". That's dead. Cowen is a good economist. He should have reached for the concept of "substitute goods."<br /><br />Here's the part that is Cowen's commentary:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I believe that marijuana legalization has moved rather rapidly into being an overrated idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To be clear, it is still an idea I favor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It seems to me wrong and immoral to put people in jail for ingesting substances into their body, or for aiding others in doing so, at least provided fraud is absent in the transaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That said, IQ is so often what is truly scarce in society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And voluntary consumption decisions that lower IQ are not something we should be regarding with equanimity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ideally I would like to see government discourage marijuana consumption by using the non-coercive tools at its disposal, for instance by making it harder for marijuana to have a prominent presence in the public sphere, or by discouraging more potent forms of the drug.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>How about higher taxes and less public availability for more potent forms of pot, just as in many states beer and stronger forms of alcohol are not always treated equally under the law?</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Props to him for making the moral case for legalization. But...an <i>overrated</i> idea? We're still sending people to prison for petty marijuana offenses. The stuff about IQ is just so much 1930s Reefer Madness hysteria. He offers no support for his suggestion that marijuana use lowers IQ. People in the comments push back on this extremely speculative claim, but he doesn't backtrack or answer them. (The comments section of Marginal Revolution is atrocious, but there are some gems if you can sift through all the garbage.) One commenter (#25 by Doug) points out that <i>almost nothing</i> permanently lowers IQ, so it would be a big surprise if marijuana did so. (Do read his comment, the replies, and Doug's reply to those replies.) This IQ comment is so bad, Cowen should to a massive mae culpa for misleading his readers with irresponsible speculation, and at a particularly bad time where policy is poised to shift. This kind of misinformation could stifle a golden opportunity for a good policy change, and that opportunity might not present itself for another decade or perhaps a generation.<br /><br />This isn't an isolated incident either. He linked to <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w23372#fromrss">this paper</a> about repealing alcohol prohibition leading to more infant deaths. I'm thinking, Wait a minute! There are serious questions about whether prohibition reduced alcohol consumption <i>at all</i>. Weren't people poisoned by tainted bathtub gin? Didn't people drink alcohol that was <a href="https://www.snopes.com/government-poison-10000-americans/">intentionally poisoned by the U.S. government</a>? Any claim that there were public health benefits due to prohibition are pretty hard to swallow, given that prohibition increased the toxicity of alcohol without much decreasing its consumption. And here's this paper suggesting that repealing alcohol prohibition caused ~13k excess infant deaths. It's hard to even take this seriously. (See Jeffrey Miron's <i>Drug War Crimes</i> on this; he fleshes out the argument that alcohol consumption didn't decrease appreciably during prohibition.)<br /><br /><a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html">Here</a> Cowen lays out his case for a "voluntary prohibition" of alcohol, enforced by social norms and not by government policy. That's fair enough and nuanced enough, and I can respect that. Here's what he says:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>The "and yes I mean all alcohol" part struck me. I <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/drug-use-isnt-cause-of-social-problems.html">reject</a> the notion that drug use per se, or alcohol use per se, causes social problems. My sipping on a beer or having a single shot of whiskey or glass of wine does not cause any appreciable damage, nor does it inexorably lead to greater alcohol consumption, nor for that matter does <i>moderate</i> consumption lead to problems. Sure, in a "but for" sense, you can blame alcohol: <i>If</i> the alcoholic or drunk driver couldn't get any, <i>then</i> their related social problems would disappear. But you simply can't make inferences such as "Drinking one beer <i>causes</i> you to ultimately drink ten beers." At best, Cowen's private prohibition should be applied specifically to problem individuals. I think he presents us with a false choice, where complete abstinence is easy but partial abstinence is difficult.<br /><br />Oh, yes, and <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/fragments-of-note.html">here</a>'s Cowen credulously repeating an easily-checkable claim by <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/13/links-116-link-a-thief-in-the-night/">Scott Alexander</a>, which grossly overstated Oxycontin-related deaths. I corrected him in the comments, and he conceded the claim "may not be correct." On the one hand, this is the internet working the way it's supposed to: Cowen and Alexander (and Robert VerBruggen, the original source of the bad info) all did mae culpas. On the other hand, it worries me that such an easily-checked claim (seriously, an easy Google search would have done it) can be repeated by such careful thinkers. It makes me reflexively doubt other claims repeated on Cowen's blog. As in, "Did he vet this <i>at all</i>, or is he just passing it along without really checking? Probably the latter."<br /><br />I'll keep reading anything and everything that Cowen writes. Seriously, hail Tyler Cowen! He is one of my major influences. I've read most of his books and read most of his blog posts. He's usually spot-on and extremely incisive. But I think this is a huge blind spot for him.<br /><br />____________________________<br /><br />Addendum: I meant to make a bigger stink about this point. A basic economic analysis comes out <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/11/against-drug-prohibition.html">strongly against</a> drug prohibition. It does so even if you make heroic assumptions to revive it. See the Gary Becker et. al. paper. You really have to make stilted, almost contradictory assumptions in favor of prohibition. Like that people respond enormously to one risk (legal sanctions) while responding little to a risk of similar magnitude (pharmacological harms). I feel like this basic point is missing from Cowen's posts on drug and alcohol policy.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-42240649916827919162018-02-13T11:19:00.000-08:002018-02-13T11:19:41.775-08:00Is the United States' High Incarceration Rate Inappropriate?More precisely, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i>inappropriate is it?<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Sorry, this is not one of my well-researched posts or one in which I can draw on my expertise. I am merely raising a question. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I get the sense that some developing nations with very poor governance just don’t bother to combat crime. Maybe they have some prisons, but these poorly-run nations don’t direct their meager government resources toward making civil society function better. Maybe these countries make greater use of corporal and capital punishment than we do. In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anocracy">anocracies</a>, people probably have to resort to “self-help” to get justice. My guess is that if some of these<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>nations didn’t execute so many criminals and let so many others go, at least some of them would have incarceration rates as high as in the US. Many would probably benefit from having more incarceration, perhaps as high as US levels.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I also get the sense that many OECD countries are too soft on their criminals. I recall watching a documentary on terrorism in Europe. It profiled a French terrorist who was a disaffected young Muslim immigrant. One of his prior offenses for which he’d served time was shooting at a police officer. I remember this being shocking, and I even said out loud to my wife, “In the US he’d be dead or in prison for life!” I realize it's a bad idea to generalize from a single example. Is this story typical of European treatment of serious criminals? I’m also thinking of a book chapter by Thomas Sowell on crime in England and the refusal of the government to dedicate the necessary resources to it. (Sorry, wish I could supply a better reference.) Maybe this impression, that Europe tends to be soft on its violent criminals, is wrong. But if not, that would explain a lot of the difference in incarceration rates.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Also, these other OECD countries often have lower actual crime rates than the US [edit: this probably isn't true as a generalization]. I’m thinking in particular of Iceland and the Scandinavian countries. These are homogeneous populations with very low crime rates. And in fact American populations with Scandinavian ancestry have similarly low crime rates. If we swapped populations or underlying crime rates with them, maybe they'd see the need for higher incarceration rates. What's the proper comparison here? All of the US to Norway, or Norwegian Americans to Norway? All of the US to Japan, or Japanese Americans to Japan? Yes, this gets quickly hits some touchy questions, but it would be daft to ignore demographics if that's one of the drivers of the difference.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />Maybe European nations have the magic formula for reforming violent criminals? Maybe the welfare state makes crime less attractive? I have serious doubts about this kind of story. Interventions aimed at social problems rarely work. It's just difficult to remold dysfunctional people into well-functioning adults. And crime has a negative expected-value payoff, so appealing to economic imperative as a rationale for crime makes little sense. My best guess is that maybe they are better at putting their ex-cons back to work, which would dramatically reduce recidivism.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The war on drugs is often provided as the reason for high American incarceration rates, but drug-related incarceration appear to be a small or modest fraction of the total [edit: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alVenYChLAM">this podcast</a> with John Pfaff says it's in the 15-20% range; oh, there are <a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/11/how_many_people.html">important qualifiers</a> for this figure]. I could, and I would, argue that prohibition leads to a lot of violent crime and property crime, which in turn leads to non-drug incarceration. But then again much of that crime does not get punished. I think this is a big part of the story, even if it's often overstated.<br /><br />Long prison sentences? Is five years just as good as 30, and other nations have figured this out? Is "Lock up particularly rowdy teens and 20-somethings until they're at least in their late 20s" a good enough strategy, but we gratuitously keep them in prison for an extra decade or two?<br /><br />My best guess is that the ideal level of incarceration is probably somewhere between the United States' level and that seen in OECD countries. It annoys me when people just report the bare statistics showing that America stands out and pretend the implications are obvious. "We lead the nation in incarceration, so obviously we're just big meanies." Or "We lead the developed world in infant mortality, so plainly we need to just copy the policies of OECD nations with lower infant mortality rates."<br /><br />What should I be reading on this topic? <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/02/mass_incarceration_a_provocative_new_theory_for_why_so_many_americans_are.html">This</a> seems like a good start, but I'm certainly open to more recommendations. Helpful suggestions welcome, but any comment of the "[scoff] It's so obvious..." variety will not be published.<br /><br />I wrote this because I think it's an uncomfortable question for libertarians. Those are exactly the kinds of questions we should concern ourselves with. What does "incarceration" look like in an anarcho-capitalist world anyway? (This isn't too much of a stumper; I've seen Bob Murphy give a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzYJYSm-MfI">pretty good answer</a>.) Would a libertarian society have an incarceration rate closer to America's current rate, or closer to Europe's? If society's optimum rate of incarceration is high (perhaps higher than America's even), is that a way that libertarian societies are <i>less free</i> than societies with large states? Would we do more corporal and capital punishment? Would we tolerate private entities meting out these kinds of punishments?<br />___________________________________<br /><br />I wrote everything above and then listened to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alVenYChLAM">this podcast</a> with John Pfaff. He seems like the guy to read on this topic. If I read his book <i>Locked In,</i> I'll report back with what I learned. Apparently US crime rates are comparable to other OECD nations (excluding <i>lethal</i> violence, where we do stand out), so part of my post above is mistaken. He argues that the war on drugs doesn't really cause that much additional violence; essentially he's arguing that those (mostly) young men would be just as violent and find other violent things to do anyway. I think this is badly mistaken. It was the one "WTF?" moment in the entire interview. Columbia? El Salvador? Honduras? Mexico? These are&nbsp; nations with the top murder rates in the world, and it's because of drug-market related violence. Drug markets in the US aren't quite so violent, but it's hard to believe that what's happening in these other countries isn't happening here (at least to a lesser degree). Plainly black markets make violence more attractive as a means of settling disputes; it would be hard to believe that American criminals uniquely fail to respond to this incentive. It's hard to believe they wouldn't get less violent if the rewards for murdering rivals/witnesses went away. Read Jeffrey Miron's <i>Drug War Crimes</i> on this topic; the relationship between prohibition and violence is very real and robust. But I'm being picky about an otherwise excellent podcast with lots of useful information. It answered a lot of my questions.</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-20952190453015426102018-02-11T14:28:00.000-08:002018-02-11T14:28:00.410-08:00Here’s How Bad the Propublica “Machine Bias” Piece Really Is<div class="MsoNormal">Imagine you have a population of criminals and you score them for recidivism risk. Let’s make the example race agnostic: you’re scoring a sample comprised of one race, or the data comes from an extremely homogeneous city or region, or it's from a territory in which the races don’t differ very much in their proclivity to commit crime or recidivate after being paroled. Anyway, we take this racially homogeneous sample and “score” it with a predictive model, such that everyone is assigned a “probability to recidivate.” This is some number ranging from 0 to 100%, not necessarily distributed uniformly across that range. And suppose the predictive modeling and scoring is fairly accurate: Of those people who are assigned a 60% chance of recidivism, 60% of them subsequently recidivate. Likewise for people assigned a 1%, 10%, 80%, 99%, etc. Whoever built the model did a pretty good job in this respect. Next, we’re going to semi-randomly assign them a class, “H” or “L”, such that high-probability people are more likely to get an H and low-probability people are more likely to get an L. The categories are not pure; there are L’s who have a 90% recidivism rate and H’s who have a 10% recidivism rate. There are L’s who do in fact recidivate and H’s who do not. But the categories <i><b>do</b></i> reflect actual relative risks; overall L’s are less likely to recidivate than H’s.</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">This population, which was fairly modeled and which we arbitrarily assigned to classes, will exhibit the same “false positives/false negatives” problem as is spelled out in Propublica's "Machine Bias" piece. The H’s, even though their modeled probability of recidivism was accurate (and thus “fair” on this criterion), will show a high rate of false positives and a low rate of false negatives. The L’s will show the converse; high false negatives and low false positives. It looks like the model is “going easy on” L’s, letting too many guilty ones off the hook. It's also “too hard on“ H’s, falsely labeling many of them as likely to recidivate when they ultimately don't. But this is purely statistical result of H’s having a higher <i>real</i> propensity to recidivate. It’s not the result of systemic racism. It <i>can't</i> be, because the H and L categories were only assigned after we modeled.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course none of this proves that there isn't systemic racism in law enforcement, and I do not want to make that claim. But it does show that the "bias" Propublica found is what we'd expect to see even when no bias exists. The metrics Propublica used to berate the recidivism prediction model will impugn even a fair model. As someone else elegantly put it, Propublica <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807">exploited an impossibility theorem</a> to write that piece. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate">false positive rate</a>, defined as false positives divided by false positives plus true negatives, will <i>always</i> be high for the higher-risk group for an unbiased model.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I wrote <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/05/propublicas-machine-bias-article-is.html">two</a> <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/05/more-on-propublicas-machine-bias-article.html">posts</a> about the original Propublica piece. A recent <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/21/links-1-18-helink-of-troy/">link-roundup</a> at Slate Star Codex, linking to <a href="https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what-journalists-want-you-to-think-it-means/">this piece</a> by authors Chris Stucchio and Lisa Mahapatra, revived my interest. Note the discussion in the comments between Ilya Shpister and Chris Stucchio. The discussion was somewhat revived in the comments of <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/28/ot94-isotopen-thread/">this open thread</a>. Stucchio's comments to Shpister and other critics are incredibly useful in understanding this debate. I recommend reading the relevant pieces of those threads.<br /><br />If I'm asked to adjudicate this debate, I think Stucchio is basically right in his original piece written with Mahapatra; he's also right in his answers to commenters in the SSC threads. Shpister is evasive and at times incredibly rude to other commenters ("Just dropping here to say this discussion is above your pay grade..."), even as Stucchio tries to get to the heart of their disagreement. I definitely agree with Stucchio that some journalists (like the authors of the Propublica piece) are being deliberately misleading, while perhaps others are merely being reckless with statistics. But don't take my word for it; you will learn more by reading through the actual threads.<br /><br />In <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/21/links-1-18-helink-of-troy/#comment-592315">this comment </a>Stucchio suggests a very useful exercise. He creates a sample (written in Python) where one race is given more traffic tickets due to unfair hassling. Being an arbitrary bias, this should have nothing to do with future propensity to commit crime. In fact a fairly simple regression should learn this bias and correct for it. I think everyone who is saying, "Well, what if the algorithm is unfair because of <i>this</i> bias..." should come up with a concrete example and show in exactly what way predictive modeling is unfair in this world. This idea can be expanded upon to answer specific criticisms or specific models of how bias creeps into the data, the modeling, or the ultimate decision-making that is&nbsp;<i><b>based on</b></i> that data and modeling.&nbsp;</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-57584799308202128292018-02-05T06:28:00.003-08:002018-02-05T12:42:04.395-08:00John Ionnidis on Econtalk<div class="MsoNormal">Very good Econtalk with <a href="http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/01/john_ioannidis.html">John Ionnidis</a>. I first heard of Ionnidis in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/">this article from The Atlantic</a> which features his work on medical literature. If you’ve heard the claim that “most published medical research is wrong,” this is where it’s coming from. Ionnidis has turned his sights on economics. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I found the discussion of the minimum wage (~15 minute mark) very interesting. The takeaway: studies claiming to find no effect of the minimum wage on employment will usually not find the effect <b><i>even if it’s real</i></b>. I know there’s been a lot of recent work trying to empirically measure the effect of minimum wages on employment. The book <i>Minimum Wages</i>, which is kind of a meta-study on the empirical literature, was published in 2008 and is probably already out of date. There have been a lot of dueling studies of increasing sophistication (statistical if not economic) saying “There’s a significant disemployment effect when you raise the minimum wage” versus “No there isn’t.” I thought that the “No there isn’t” crowd were employing some kind of sneaky statistical wizardry to make the effect disappear. Maybe not. Ionnidis claims that, for most of these studies there will only be a ~10% chance of finding a statistically significant effect. (8.5% is the "median power" of these analyses, if I understand him.) Someone trying to build the case for “there is no disemployment effect” could do so by essentially publishing studies at random. I don't think this kind of trick would work in today's world; a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot">funnel plot</a> will reveal the publication bias. Still, taking Ionnidis's point, we should look skeptically at any one study.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Here’s an excerpt of the conversation. (This seemed crystal clear and well-laid-out when I hear the podcast, but reading the transcript it’s hard to find an excerpt of the piece I found interesting. I’ve noticed this before with transcripts of conversations. “The point” is never crystallized into a single quote as a careful writer might do on purpose; it’s always distributed across several exchanges between the conversants.):<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><blockquote>Russ Roberts: Let's do that again. Let's say that again. So, let's try to put it in the context of an actual empirical question that might be examined in economics. One of the ones you mentioned in the paper is the impact of a minimum wage on employment. And a caveat: Of course, there are many other aspects and impacts of the minimum wage besides whether you have a job or not. It can affect the number of hours; it can affect the training you receive; it can affect the way you are treated on the job. And it bothers me that economists only look at this one thing--this 1-0 variable, job-or-not. Number of jobs. Without looking at the quality, outside of the monetary, financial aspect. But, that's what we look at, often. And it is the central question in the area of minimum wage policy: Does it reduce or even expand potentially--which I think is crazy, but okay, a lot of people don't agree--whether it expands or reduces the number of jobs. Now, in such an empirical analysis of the minimum wage, how would you describe the power of that test? Meaning, there's some effect that we don't know of that impact. The power is--fill in the blank--the probably that?<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: Right. So, for that particular question, the median power if I recall that we estimated was something like 8 or 9%.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: It is. I looked at it; I've got it right here. It is 8.5%.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: There you go.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: That means--so, what does 8.5% mean, in that context?<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: It means that, if you estimate for each one of these studies that have been done, what are the chances that they would have found that effect? That they would have found a statistically significant signal, if the effect is what is suggested by the largest studies, for example? Their median chance would be 8.5%. So, 50% of the studies would have 8.5% chances or less to be able to detect that signal. Which is amazing. I mean, if you think of that--<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: It's depressing--<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: Or depressing, actually. I mean, they basically have no chance of finding that. Even if it is there.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: So, does this work on both sides of the question?<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: It is very, very difficult for them to pick it up.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: Does this work on both sides of the question? Meaning: It obviously depends on your null hypothesis. So, if your null hypothesis is: Minimum wages have no effect, and I'm going to test whether they have an effect, you are going to say: Does that mean I'm going to find that I only have an 8% chance of finding that effect?<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: Yeh. It would mean that even if that effect is there, you would have an 8.5% chance of detecting it.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: So, most of the time, I would not find it.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: So, most of the time you would find a non-significant result. Called a null result. Or, seemingly null result. Even though there is some effect there.<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>Russ Roberts: But it could go the other way, too. Because your null hypothesis could be that the minimum wage has an effect; and I'm testing whether there is no effect. And I might not be able to find no effect. Is that correct to go in that opposite direction?<br /><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p>John Ioannidis: So, what happens in the opposite direction is that when you are operating in an underpowered environment, you have two problems. One is the obvious: That you have a very high chance of false negative. Because this is exactly what power means. It means that 92%, if you have an 8% power--92% of the time, you will not be able to pick the signal. Even though it is there. So, it's a false negative. At the same time, you have the problem of having a very high risk of a false positive when you do see something that has a statistically significant p-value attached to it. And, it could be an entire false positive, or it could be a gross exaggeration of the effect size. And, um, it could be that the smaller the power that you are operating with, if you do detect something, even if it is real, the magnitude of the effect size will be substantially inflated. So, the smaller the power, the greater the average inflation of the effect that you would see, when you do detect it. So, two major problems. With low power: lots of false negatives. Second problem: lots of false positives and gross exaggeration of the effect sizes.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-75323814026631197182018-02-03T14:27:00.001-08:002018-02-03T14:27:42.841-08:00I Can’t Wait To Hear What a Terrible Person I Am!I think I make my libertarian politics abundantly clear. I discuss policy, offer arguments and evidence, and try to have intelligent discussions (which almost never seem to materialize). So it is tremendously annoying when a libertarian-ish policy proposal seems within arms reach, and it gets idiotically denounced within the framework of petty partisan politics. Recent examples involve the tax bill, Betsy DeVos' appointment as education secretary, and Republican-proposed "healthcare" bills.<br /><br />My take on education is that there should be a total separation of education and state. I've argued my position <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-beautiful-tree-by-james-tooley.html">here</a>. Also <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/03/funding-college-education.html">here</a>. Much more recently, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-rapid-decay-of-your-education.html">here</a>. In addition to these blog posts, maybe every month or so I'll post a link to Facebook that supports my position. Usually this is a well-argued post by someone else. And 99% of the time these are completely ignored. But then people scream bloody murder when an education secretary gets appointed who is sympathetic with school choice. (It's particularly ridiculous considering that education is mostly funded and administered by state and local governments; a pro-choice education secretary really can't do very much.) I'm left thinking, "Hey, guys, I brought this all up before and you didn't have anything to say about it then. Did you have to wait until everyone was frothing at the mouth before we discussed? Couldn't we have had a civil discussion when heads were cooler?" Apparently not.<br /><br />I have a similar position on healthcare. See <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/10/free-medicine-doesnt-make-people.html">here</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/09/ensuring-americas-health.html">here</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/05/exaggerating-market-failure-in-health.html">here</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/04/term-life-plus-health-insurance-package.html">here</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/03/health-insurance-should-be-more-like.html">here</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/03/people-skimp-on-medicine-when-they-pay.html">here</a>, <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2017/01/healthcare-policy-changing-falsifiable.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/11/how-to-cover-pre-existing-conditions.html">here</a>. Everything that the government does to regulate the supply of medicine or the health insurance industry backfires tremendously and saddles us with problems. We have nothing to show for all the money we waste on subsidized medicine. But once again, expect people to wax wroth and froth at the mouth when a mild retreat from the existing level of government regulation is actually within arms reach. It's another example of, "Gee, we could have talked about it sooner. Remember when I brought this up? Couldn't we have discussed this reasonably before tempers were hot?" Some topics just don't register unless they are stated in starkly partisan terms. And once you manage to operate within this extremely narrow bandwidth, a sensible proposal for a good policy gets bogged down with all the partisan (even personal) baggage of the coalition that proposed it.<br /><br />I could go on. Immigration. Drug legalization. The minimum wage. Inefficient taxes on capital. I've shared opinions on all of these topics. Nobody wants to read and discuss a book or white paper on the economics of the minimum wage. But the moment it turns into party-versus-party sloganeering, people pipe up and start spewing the shallowest arguments in their arsenal. If some libertarian politicians come to power and start implementing libertarian policy proposals, I'll get to hear what horrible people they are for wanting poor children to suffer (from malnutrition, lack of healthcare, insufficient schooling, or whatever). And I'll think, "Wait a minute, that proposal is far milder than my favored policy. Am I a horrible person for believing these things? If I surveyed the evidence on health/education/drug/labor policy and came to different conclusions, does that make me a horrible person? I wish we could have had a conversation about this when I brought it up years ago, rather than having a 'my coalition is bigger and angrier' shouting match." Non-libertarians are wrong about the likely effects of non-interventionist (even less-interventionist) policy in all these areas. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong and a civil discussion would reveal a flaw in how I think about these things. Unfortunately, that civil discussion isn't on anyone's radar until an actual policy change is within striking distance (debated in congress, proposed as part of a bill, etc.). And at that point it's almost impossible to keep that discussion civil. There are some exceptions; a few rare corners of the internet are good at staying on topic and adding light rather than heat. I hope this blog is one of them.Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-50484746322948286532018-02-03T13:37:00.000-08:002018-02-03T13:37:06.713-08:00Treat People Like People or Treat People Like Robots?<div class="MsoNormal">Getting out of bed sucks. It’s usually the worst part of my day. I have to <i>drag</i> myself out of bed every morning. I imagine I’m not the only person who feels this way. So how do others respond to the same experience?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">David and Drew feel equal amounts of dread the moment their alarm clocks go off. David forces himself out of bed, gets through his morning ritual, goes to work, and has a stellar career because of his self-discipline. Drew repeatedly indulges his impulse to hit the “snooze” button, or just turns off his alarm entirely and goes back to sleep. As a result, he is repeatedly out of work, and when he does find work it’s in a marginal part-time low-skilled job.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />How should we describe these diverging paths? I might say that David <i>chooses</i> to endure some pain because he knows the payoff is high. I might describe Drew as <i>choosing</i> to indulge his lust for sleep. I could even place a judgmental spin on it: David is exercising bourgeois virtues and showing his good work ethic while Drew is being a lazy bum. But even supposing I place value judgments aside; perhaps Drew is perfectly happy with his mix of leisure and income just as David is. Value judgments or no value judgments, think I’d describe them as somehow choosing their paths. I’d describe them as <i>deciding</i> how to live.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I used to have interminable discussions with someone who would have none of this. The concept of choice was an illusion, because we’re all meat robots. If I want to use terms like “decide” and “choose” I must strictly define my terms and explain how this process of “making a decision” happens. My pedestrian concept of “choice” was an illusion because David and Drew are both operating in a world governed by deterministic physics (or random quantum physics, which doesn’t exactly resurrect “free will”). Everything is outside of these men’s power to control. Perhaps Drew and David have different thresholds for “unpleasant stimulus.” Or perhaps they experience “waking up” differently; it is simply too painful for Drew to endure while David experiences it cheerfully. Or Drew simply has a subroutine running in his meat-brain that says, “Stay in bed when the alarm goes off” while David has one that says, “Wake up despite the unpleasantness.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It doesn’t actually matter to me (or to anyone else, frankly) what’s going on in Drew and David’s brains. I don’t really care whether they are deterministic robots or free-willed avatars complete with a soul. I don’t care whether the stuff driving their behavior looks more like clockwork or more like free choice. I don’t even care if David and Drew are created unequally, such that David was born with “more willpower” while Drew was born with less inherent ability to resist temptation. What matters to me is how society’s judgments and expectations affect these men’s behavior. Drew may intrinsically have difficulty motivating himself because of things within his constitution beyond anyone’s control. His “laziness” might not be “his fault.” But if he lives in a world that’s infinitely forgiving, a world that treats him like an automaton simply responding to internal clockwork, he will behave <i>worse</i> than if he lives in a world that’s more judgmental. David’s constitutional makeup might make him more inclined to behave virtuously, but he might indulge more Drew-like behaviors if he is treated with the same infinite forgiveness. Even if we suppose people are software running on the hardware of their brains, that software contains many “respond to incentives and expectations and social norms” subroutines. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But what do I know? I’m just another meat robot running deterministic subroutines inside my brain. Some of those subroutines say “punish mild vices with mild social censure”; others say “punish severe vices with harsher social censure”; others say “help people a lot for problems they didn’t create themselves; help people less for problems of their own creation”; others say “punish actual crimes with something harsher than social censure.” We all have these, and we all know that everyone else has these. Such “subroutines” running in other people’s heads are part of our environment. We are constantly updating our expectations, judging various transgressions, and trying to avoid judgment, even <i>punishment</i>, ourselves. Such a being can be “deterministic”, but there is enough recursion and uncertainty to make it <i>look like</i> free will. Close enough that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">You may disagree with me, but why bother arguing? I’m just a meat robot. I can’t choose to think otherwise.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p><br />________________________________________<br /><br />Of course we may want to temper our judgment given people's observable abilities. I had written everything above over a week ago, and since then was confronted with a few challenging cases. I met a person who has only one arm, which plainly limits one's choices. I spoke to someone who suffers sometimes-debilitating back pain. (Is back pain something that <i>just happens </i>to you? Or is it something that we can usually avoid by staying in better shape?) Some people are born with intellectual disabilities; it is unfair to accuse them of "choosing" not to become doctors or engineers. And some people are crippled by mental illness that has nothing to do with the intellect. I met the blind son of a former colleague who wants to be an actuary; he is able to navigate Excel by audio. And this reminded me of Walter Oi, a blind economist with an incredibly successful career. I think it's fine to talk about how some people are born with a wider range of choices than others. But I think it's daft to obliterate the concept of "choice" altogether. I'm more in the "We are the authors of our own destiny" camp than I am in the "Stuff just happens to you and you don't have a say in it" camp, for reasons outlined above. Denying the existence of choice, and denying that successful people caused their own success, does a disservice to people who overcome their disadvantages. It just seems churlish to react to the story of a blind person becoming a successful professional by saying, "Meh, that just kind of happened to him because he had natural ability. He didn't 'choose' to be successful." This is why the "inequality" framing of any social problem is philosophically bankrupt; this framing is <i>by definition</i> grouping people by outcomes. A more useful framing would be to group people by their professed goals and effort expended, and seeing how much "inequality" results after controlling for those factors.<br /><br />I recently re-read an old Facebook thread where my interlocutor challenged me repeatedly to "define choice," and I repeatedly challenged him to "come up with a scenario where changing the definition of choice changes the outcome of an argument." I think many writers get bogged down by their worst trolls, and maybe this is my own example. Scott Sumner (at least on his Money Illusion blog) often inserts hedges and preemptive responses to commenters, which sometimes distract from the flow of a great post. I think Scott Alexander sometimes does the same thing. I don't interact with that person anymore, but because of his nagging I still hesitate to use words like "choose" and "decide" in the way that we all understand them. Maybe that's wrong and I should just speak freely.</div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7037761021913273375.post-33260298403671425152018-02-03T06:29:00.000-08:002018-02-03T06:29:04.156-08:00Brilliant Framing in Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" Trilogy<div class="MsoNormal">Thomas Sowell does something brilliant in his <i>Cultures</i>&nbsp;trilogy, which is comprised of his books <i>Conquests and Cultures</i>, <i>Migrations and Cultures</i>, and <i>Race and Culture</i>. The books are broadly about the notion that culture matters. Peoples tend to develop long-standing patterns of behavior that are adaptive to the particular times and places of their origins (or perhaps just idiosyncratically different from similarly situated peoples). When those peoples spread to other places via migration or conquest, they bring their long-standing traditions with them. And these traditions persist for generations. He makes it very clear that this is a non-genetic story of culture. It isn’t racial, except in the sense that a racial group might also be a cultural group. He is extremely clear that he’s talking about patterns of behavior that are learned and culturally enforced, not genetic propensities to behave in certain ways. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">His brilliance is to lead with the example of the Roman conquest of northern Europe and Britain. A well understood stylized fact about modern Europe is that southern Europe tends to be more corrupt, poorer, and less well governed. In a book called <i>Games Primates Play</i> by an Italian author (Dario Maestripieri), there is a long discussion about the corruption that is rampant in Italy, and how this corruption is least bad in the north but gets worse as one moves south. Northern European states, by contrast, tend to be less corrupt, better governed, and richer (almost certainly as a consequence of their better institutions). Think Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland as compared to Italy, Spain, and Greece. Without a formal model or rigorous regression analysis, at a glance there is something to this stereotype.<br /><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Except two thousand years ago, this was flipped. Rome was the peak of western civilization. Northern Europe was backwards, filled with naked barbarians and disgusting villagers who were naked or clad in animal skins. According to Sowell, “[N]ot a single Briton’s name had entered the pages of history” before Julius Caesar conquered the island. What’s more, when the Roman Empire collapsed and retreated from these conquered territories, those territories retrogressed. They lost what civilization Rome had brought to them, in many places taking a millennium or more to recover. Often the very same people working on the very same land with the same equipment become more productive after the Romans conquered, because the Romans actually provided a predictable rule of law. They brought Roman legal traditions with them, along with the means of putting down violent uprisings and brigandry that weaker states (or non-states) couldn’t deal with. Merchant peoples followed the Roman conquerors into conquered lands and set up shop; they also followed them out when the Roman Empire declined. Uncivilized social disorder can be bad for business.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Leading with this example achieves several things. It takes race out of the question. We’re talking about Europeans conquering other Europeans, so there’s no racial baggage. Given that, it’s safe for Sowell to make his next point: It’s fairly clear that the conquered peoples often benefited from the conquest. Even the faintest hint of this point applied to the 20<sup>th</sup> century immediately gets bogged down in discussions of racism, and accusations that the speaker is “defending” violent military conquest or suggesting racial superiority of the conqueror. The example also makes the point that culture, while durable, is not permanent. The Britons benefited from Roman cultural traditions under Roman conquest, retrogressed to a more primitive state after Roman collapse, but then eventually became the richest, most culturally and militarily advanced nation in the world. If they were eventually surpassed, it was by their thoroughly Anglicized former colonies (America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand), not necessarily by former colonies that did not thoroughly adopt English cultural traditions and institutions.<br /><br />It's not that the "race" question is unimportant in a discussion of the history of conquest. Rather it's a topic that is so emotionally charged it can prevent people from thinking clearly or giving due consideration to probably-true propositions. Sowell certainly doesn't dodge the race issue. He meets it head-on. It features prominently in all three books. But the "Britons versus Romans" example presents a nice test case where these complications and their associated baggage aren't really present.<o:p></o:p><br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Culture isn’t race. With that out of the way...Culture matters. Culture is durable. Culture <i>eventually</i> changes. Culture can be bad as well as good. Bad things, like military conquest, can cause good things, like the spread of good cultural practices.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></div></div>Jubal Harshawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11196096815699469262noreply@blogger.com0